Tango dies slowly

Tango - a dance of beauty and resilience in the face of oppression. Over 200 years ago, people living in the poor immigrant neighbourhoods of  Buenos Aires who had travelled there to find their fortune invented the tango - a dance that has now been declared part of the world's "intangible cultural heritage" by UNESCO - as an expression of their misery. Although, at the time, the tango was considered by the upper classes to be unsavoury and degenerate, it is today one of the country’s biggest tourist attractions. Yet the applauding onlookers often forget the origins and history of this significant dance. “The tango was born in the slums, not in the ballroom. When you can’t see or feel that, the dance is dead,” commented dancer Carmen Calderon. She’s talking about an essential quality of the tango. As a dance, it can never be superficial. It is always serious. And it is always simultaneously sad and sensuous.

Tini Papamichalis and Dietmar Baum’s photo series, Tango Dies Slowly, captures the ambivalence of the tango in the beauty and adversity of Buenos Aires. They have used Hasselblad technology to create a multifaceted collage of Buenos Aires with fine art photographs.

It is the quiet statements made by the photographs that make them so subtle. The bland vegetable seller who struggles to get out of his van day after day, the chair on the sidewalk that appears to be waiting for someone or invites us to wait. (In this city, what people wait for doesn’t seem to be particularly important). The building walls in the colours of the rainbow symbolise hope.

Over 200 years after the tango was invented in the slums, this city boasts modern skyscrapers next to a construction crane from the German Democratic Republic. A luxury hotel pool complex looks obscure, as if in a shoe box, amidst the reality of life in Argentina. Deliberately out-of-focus shots depicting busy street scenes create new shapes that are reflected in the city’s multi-coloured walls. Like the tango, the extensive graffiti effectively sums up life’s sorrow and happiness. It is part of a new era with new forms of expression, though they are no less melancholy.

All of the photos have an underlying mood of elegance and decay: an everyday mixture of hunger for capitalism and hunger for life. A life that is like the tango - sad, sensuous, erotic, violent and quiet. Yet if it wasn’t all those things, it wouldn’t be their life and it wouldn’t be their dance.