Author: Tarantino Luis

"Tango muses call him"


He is a dwarf that arises from the streets of the cities that represent Rio de la Plata in each one of their borders: Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

He is Horacio Ferrer, the wonderful poet and President, from his foundation in 1990, of the Tango National Academy of the Argentine Republic.

Ferrer is an untiring worker for whom nothing is impossible. Some time ago, the Tango Academy managed, by means of its managements, to buy what is its headquarter (Carlos Gardel Palace) in the most emblematic Café in Buenos Aires, the Tortoni, where its administrative headquarter works, the Tango National School (where researchers, artists and students to come are prepared), the flaming Tango Styles Conservatory Argentino Galván, where musicians and singers specialize in languages and the applied techniques of tango, and now, as the most recent accomplishment, the World-wide Museum of Tango, of which we are talking about.

Luis Tarantino: How are you doing after this new Academy and Tango achievement?

Horacio Ferrer: Very happy for having been able to consecrate this dream and of the way it was obtained. Imitating Homero Manzi, who invented an argument for a film in a blank sheet and managed to impose it, I can´t believe what I´m going through. Each thing in its place, each thing at its time, each thing with an educational and simultaneously surprise tone. Because to see all the tango history in a landscape of murals, display cabinets and scopes is something that was in us obtaining and finally we made the decision to do it in the year 2003 and we got it to inaugurate.


LT: You said something of this thinking that exists of museums as something fossilized in time.

HF: The famous cemetery of art and not the site of muses, where the word museum comes from.


LT: How do you do for it not to become an art cemetery?

HF: Tango remains alive. Still a great part of tango which stays in the past remains alive. That is why we have the ' Glories Olympus ' and a sort of living tango workshop, that is to say that everyday, an orchestra of young tango with dancers and young singers go and play. So that the public can see the continuity in the presence of everything that is exposed.


LT: I believe it also has two projectors with videos and films, is that right?

HF: Sure! The audio-visual system is very important, essential I would say, in these days of video clips, television and so on. As soon as you climb up the stairs at the entrance, the tango films projections are seen. We all know the importance that has always been given to the tango cinema: from Chaplin or Rodolfo Valentino to Pacino or De Niro. In the other projector, concerts can be seen and listened to without interruption. Also, performances, rehearsals and recordings of the greatest artists of this genre, as much as orchestras, groups, singers or dancers. In addition, we have guides in English, French and Portuguese, so far (laughter).


LT: It is magnificent that everybody can go through tango history up to present time and that each visit is crowned by the live performance of young artists.

HF: There are some orchestras that rehearse in the Academy; then, these young people can go and expose their ideas on tango by playing.


LT: What do you expect to fulfill in the future with this World-wide Tango Museum?

HF: I think that this is a first version because it is very compressed and abstracted to be a short path. It takes approximately one hour and a half to cross it. However, my idea is to buy a four-storeyed Petit Hotel… and then there would be a storey for Gardel, another for Piazzolla or Julio De Caro or Troilo, for the others, Susana Rinaldi, Goyeneche and so many others, it is endless, there is always room for more. Tango and its artists are immeasureable. It is endless.


LT: It is necessary to enjoy it and enrich it day by day.


HF: Of course it is necessary to visit it and we invite everybody. There are beautiful stairs like the one in the Louvre, by which you have access to a-two meter tall sculpture of a beautiful tango couple by our Academic and great sculptor Leo Vinci. Instead of Victoria de Samocracia, which is in the Louvre, you can see this magnificent work of art.


Rivadavia 830 - first floor - Buenos Aires