Faivovich & Goldberg's practice is, in fact, a cohesive long-term and open-ended single research project, named A Guide to the Campo del Cielo. It started with the two artists visiting a State Park, 1400kms north of Buenos Aires, in Argentina's Campo del Cielo region (which holds one of the largest meteorite fields of the world). Visiting other institutions that featured Campo del Cielo meteorites, they became intrigued by El Taco, a halved meteorite whose other part apparently went missing. Since that encounter at the Buenos Aires Planetarium, the duo simply set out to find all the information on which it could lay its hands. And they've been at it incessantly since 2006.

Our conversations to date, on skype and over coffees in NYC, have focused on the relation between the document and the ancestral "thing." (Rivet's readings of Quentin Meillassoux certainly shaped this focus.) The artists are fervent collectors of historical reference material. Though they surely share a documentary impulse with regular archive and library rats, they stay at a safe distance from interpretation. (This is not to say that they don't have a viewpoint, quite the opposite.) The documents are, essentially, things, just as the meteorites are things. There is no real hierarchy that catalogs or separates them. As such, human history and natural objects flow into each other--more, both depend on each other. Whereas the collected documents (which will hopefully digitized and web-accessible in the future) could come in helpful for future curious investigators, there's an awareness that the meteorites of the Campo del Cielo will remain mute and therefore will continue to prompt the production of documents.

Something else that has come up in our conversations, is the entry of a thing as "foreign" as a meteorite into the gallery space. While much of the Guide consists in accumulating or replicating information (printed matter, mostly), a grand achievement of the project was the clever and successful use of the structures of the artworld as well as of scientific institutions to reunite the two halves of El Taco. We're still thinking about the notions of performance and prop in this respect.

Last January we spent some more time with Nico who gave us a walkthrough of their new work in The Inaccessible Poem, an exhibition curated by Simon Starling at the Fondazione Merz in Torino. We particularly discussed the role or trope of the disappeared or missing object (whether it be a legendary thing or a set of film negatives) as instigator of the duo's simultaneous research projects. It's these objects' inaccessibility that brings forward nationalist ideology, institutional history or decaying monumental architecture. The lack of the object(s) also makes their work depend on a set of references and ad hoc networks that help shed a partial light on the reality of the object, proving that the one doesn't come without the other, and vice versa.