Mario García Torres’s Have you ever seen the snow?

How do you envision Kabul in the 1970s as a place for contemporary art? What happened in that city that attracted Boetti and then, decades later, attracted you?

I started to be invested in understanding Afghanistan from far away because of the venture Boetti had taken there. But when you look at the geography and history of those lands, you can tell how easy it was for them to become intriguing places. I would say that Boetti maybe had a certain fantasy about Central Asia. He believed he was following in the steps of one of his ancestors, an Italian man who had changed his name to Sheikh Mansur and who had led a Chechen rebellion. I think the anonymity he could enjoy there also played a role. He could become someone else, even become more than one person there. It is said that people in Kabul thought he was one of two twin brothers.

When Boetti first arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan was still a kingdom. After a coup d’etat two years later, it became a republic. Both heads of states during that decade had a policy of maintaining national independence while pursuing gradual modernization. It was a culturally rich but economically poor and secluded country, and I think this contributed to its mystique. It attracted many travelers, most of whom were hippies who arrived there in buses. I imagine the Share Naw, the neighborhood where Boetti would establish the One Hotel—a simple place where young Europeans mingled with the locals, and where they could buy goat clothing, carpets, and drugs. It was a place where an easy Westernized life was possible. I can’t imagine that there was absolutely nothing there that resembled contemporary art, but the National Museum of Afghanistan had been established decades before. It displayed a spectacular collection of Buddhist and Islamic archeological finds that told of ancient stories from the region.

Your work Have you ever seen the snow? is a slide projection narrated with a very odd voice-over. Can you talk about the decision to use this anachronistic technology and the narrator’s almost robotic voice?

At the time, I had used slides in other works, intending to create a somewhat cinematic space, and also to tell a historical narrative that didn’t feel like the truth. Now we are used to beautiful video, cinematic video, but at the time video felt more TV than cinema, and I didn’t want to compete with cinema. So slides seemed to solve this problem, being somewhere between cinema and an art class. In fact, I studied art history using slides. I guess that experience informed not only the choice of medium but also the narrative. The text was loosely based on the most orthodox way of analyzing a historical painting. The voice had to do with the pace and also a voice that I remembered from German documentaries. In the early years of Mexican TV, they showed a lot of those, so you had the impression that knowledge came from there. For me, it was a way to flirt with that format, like creating a fiction about what knowledge was.

Can you talk about the relationship—and the gap—between the imaginary Kabul of your first two works, and the Kabul you experienced after Documenta?

Imaginary Kabul was mediated through the news, mainly, and through some narratives by Western travelers, so it was a more violent city than the real one. When I finally physically arrived there, Kabul seemed so familiar in a way: war was looming, but not present every day. At least not in Share Naw. Seeing the neighborhood I had been reconstructing for so long was a strange feeling: some things, some buildings, made me think I knew it perfectly, and then scratches in the matrix appeared, mistakes in my imaginary Kabul that turned things around. But overall the feeling was of a familiar place. Maybe coming from the north of Mexico, where I come from, also helped. At the time in Mexico we were also getting used to military presence, because of a different kind of violence, and desert, modest architecture, and dust seem just like being back home. My film Tea, the piece I did later, talks about these similarities. The relationship between the familiarity and the remoteness of a place can be an engaging paradox.