Much more than
a gay-lesbian-transexual multipurpose space, Brandon is an utopic experiment,
a lab of talent and ideas, an operation that seems to be out of time
and place, in a neigborhood that few call Palermo Soho-tracing symmetry
with Manhattan and alluding in topography to the Old Borgean Palermo-.
This less than subtle upgrade operation over charmless streets, does
not stop the neighbors from calling the neigborhood Villa Crespo. Casa
Brandon, whose logo is an alpine house with a blood red heart inside
it, functions as a type of club, an academy of artist apprentices and
well-known artists, which apply heterodox methods of production and
produces addictive behavior in its members, that is the impression I
get when I go there to see teenagers who listen to Adicta, or to Leo
Garcia, or to "I will go out and if I get hit by lightning"
(publisher), but with tender determination they resist the poetry shows
of Gaby Bejerman, Sebastián Freire's art exhibitions and, a few
nights back, the romantic french songs of a heavy metal looking girl
who played her guitar with a t-shirt that read: "J'aime ta femme".
Brandon begins when the night clubs end: at home by the fireplace.
Its expansive energy goes from the Gay Pride Parties to-every year the
girls who formed Brandon have their own float at the GLBTQ Parade in
Buenos Aires which at one point was a red fire truck- nomade parties
every fifteen days and its vertiginous adventures online.
At Brandon I saw artists perform from the German label Monika Enterprise,
I listened to some musicians from the electrohappening festival and
some very sexy girls read erotic texts, I saw boys dancing tango and
strong girls rehearse texts in the bathroom; I watched the beautiful
English series "Tipping the Velvet", and I saw my favorite
writer read from his personal diary. Brandon doesn't provide information:
it provides formation.
In a political gesture-involuntarily political-towards visibility, equality,
equity and the construction of an GLBTQ identity, Brandon works as a
cultural alternative space for musicians, digital and visual artists,
poets and designers, but it also functions as a spacial equivalent of
household literature of the nineteenth century, a small artifact that
has in it, in souvenir fashion, a lit log that keeps its combustion
with its urban tribes and cultural lineage. Brandon is the inventor
of the artistic club as a bag of hot water.
It is an utopic experiment in a homely device and much more than that,
a way of existing.
