It’s 5:30 in the morning and I feel kind of strange. All my life I was used to put on my skies in front of my porch in the Tyrolean Alps. Now I am standing at the corner of Parera y Quintana in the middle of Recoleta, dressed in a skiing outfit, with my backpack and skis in my hand, waiting for a taxi.

“You want to hitchhike? It’s easy…there’s a provincial border on Ruta 3 just past the turn off for Las Grutas. All you have to do is walk 10km through the desert and you’re there.” It seemed easy enough. We had spent a fortune on bus tickets from Buenos Aires and were ready to turn the remaining 2,000km to Tierra del Fuego into an adventure.

Pablo Mikozzi’s characters go straight at Buenos Aires’ deformities: the xenophobia, the paranoia, the violence, the isolation. He manages the tricky business of transforming grotesque trappings into humour with elegance and ease, making people laugh at themselves while avoiding the sardonic and insulting.

In the last months of 2007, Buenos Aires got pinked. A pink chaise longue, pink awning, pink shop fittings, pink tables and chairs, an entire clothing collection and a pink Volkswagen Beetle were moved to their new home: the very first Barbie store in the world.