Beyond the world of monumental fantasies, of the devouring beings in the disquieting and catastrophic gardens of Bormazo and the prisons of Piranesi (which is almost a parameter to the fascist and soviet architecture of this century), the art of Guillermo Kuitca belongs to an order of cannibal architectures. Let us draw Bormazo away. Cannibalism is not a diet. Hélio Oiticica's Tropicalia¹ or a split house by Gordon Matta-Clark are architectures that address the land ownership situation and social-urban marginality·indexes of a certain economic cannibalism. In Kuitca's painting, in its void, some architectures for the human masses are like the Egyptian tombs, whose stones devoured bodies·cenotaph·and the Roman coliseum. Stadiums, theaters, hospitals are uninhabited architectural plants, as if the human beings had been consumed by the regulation logic of the body's place in the social space. It is an uncanny type of topological anticipation of the panoptic. Some of the paintings reveal Kuitca's interest in panoptic architecture², which devours spaces and reverts the soul into a prison of the body.³ Another agonic architecture of Kuitca are the plans of houses drawn with thorns: desire, the house with Aids, one of the epidemics which devour the species. Kuitca's houses are not anthropomorphic as in Munch's paintings. Detached from the idea of a constructed body, melancholy seemed to be satisfied with the graphic representation of the architectural plant. A plant of the house with two rooms would constitute a metaphor of the familial unity·and is this not the Freudian scene where totem and taboo take place? The theater devours, not because of its cruelty, capable of liberating even the impulses of cannibalism, as proposed by Antonin Artaud.⁴ If Artaud's "theater of cruelty" is not representation, but life in a level where it is unrepresentable, as Derrida states,⁵ then, the house plant in the work of Kuitca could no longer be a mere projection of the edifice, but the anticipated actualization of the experience to be already lived there. A painting by Kuitca can also be the actual stage design of his method of artistic appropriation. Borges and Bacon. The Beatles or Bausch. The frightening stairways of Eisenstein's Battleship of Potempkin, seem to discharge in El mar dulce, the gates for immigrant Jewish families. The name of the city is left behind and brings in its terrifying memory, in this cartography of uncertainties, the index of crematorium furnaces. It is impossible to forget, I insist. Cannibal architecture is, therefore, a monument of barbarity. Marienplatz. Would it really be necessary to define the most precise metaphor of war as cannibalism? Would they be the barricades of Meissonier's painting, as an emblematic figure of all repression: the very trope of the interdito?⁶ Or would it be the solitary room where a mother waits for her son to return from the war, as in a Kuitca painting? Maps·representations of the world and economic and military instruments·in calling the name they no longer call the place. The borders are dissolved, informations of the trajectory are dissipated. Tango steps could even be reappropriated from Warhol. Tango is the arms of seduction. Beds, where that which hurts and flows as fantasmatics is the place where desire establishes itself as a melancholic cannibalism in surrender. Kuitca then, refers to Bacon. The stomach is the cave of desire's chimera: decipher me or I will devour you. Because in difference, One is always the great and largest architecture of cannibalism and cannibalism, even the real one, is a symbolic practice of incorporating the Other.