Four thousand years ago, a meteorite shower took place in a region of Northern Argentina. The original inhabitants of this area named the region Pinguem Nonraltá, which means Field of the Sky in the Guaycurú language. El Taco, which weighed 1998 kg, is a fragment of an 800-ton iron mass, older than Earth itself, coming from the Asteroid Belt located between Mars and Jupiter. Discovered in 1962 by a farmer plowing his fields, the meteorite was retrieved by a joint scientific expedition between the U.S.A. and Argentina. It was then officially presented to the Smithsonian Institution. Since the North-American scientists lacked precise technology to section large specimens, the meteorite was shipped to the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. El Taco was divided in two halves through a critical cutting procedure that took more than a year. Since then, one part has been located at Washington's Smithsonian Institution, the other one in Buenos Aires's Planetarium.
After almost forty-five years, the two main masses of El Taco will be reunited in Germany for the first time, at this Faivovich & Goldberg exhibition, a step in their journey toward dOCUMENTA (13), where a future stage of their project A Guide to Campo del Cielo will take place in 2012.
