Julián Kartun, actor, singer and leader of the band El Kuelgue, is the new guest of Caja Negra, the interview cycle of Filo.News conducted by Julio Leiva.Born on November 7, 1983, he started acting from a young age and, from there did not stop. In 2004 he formed the group he now leads with friends of adolescence and with which he has been very popular.” There is a lot of humor in my old man’s works, that always accompanied me – start Julian – I was the clown of the degree. Comedy was always part of the dynamics of my life.” Her debut on the small screen was with “Magazine for Fai” with Mex Urtizberea in 1995: “They were looking for kids to perform and in that search they went to one of my classes in Rio Plateado and told me to try the pilot. I was 10, 11. It was all a lot of fun, a game, tiring, exhausting, but it was playing among friends and the product looked spectacular.”
“Luckily he was bored on Saturdays and Tuesdays, and I didn’t have that much exposure, because I wanted to act and my old men didn’t. Then I cut and came back bigger. My goal was to raise money to buy me a camera. Then I started being in the production part behind the camera and later became more actor,” he adds. About Mauricio Kartun, his father, playwright and director, argues: “It served me ‘to be a son of’ because beyond being very kingpin in what he does, he accompanies me in my activity since I was a child and is also very dear in the middle, then he opened doors for me. Now it happens to me that I’m going to make a movie, and I meet a first actor and he says, ‘How you ran through the dressing rooms.'” As one of his first inspirations, he names “Cha Cha Cha”: “I love it, I keep looking at it. With the kus of the Kuelgue it was the first thing we talked about. We’d get together and take the Nesquik and watch VHS’s of it. Something similar happens to Me with Peña, I go back to that a lot. My favorite of ‘Cha cha cha’ was Homemade and Alberi. Now I really like Capusotto.”
Julio Leiva and Julián Kartun in Caja Negra | Photo: Filo.News
Kartun also reveals that he was kicked out of school: “It’s a school where if you took more than so many subjects they could choose to leave. I had taken me 7 to March and put them in, and it was a bard. Always the problem was authority. With my old man too. When I finished high school and started laburar, I discovered a new world that didn’t see it. I won my money, moved alone as a young man and there appeared another world… I can make my way, I don’t need authority.” He also had a past as an editor: “I edited a lot of MTV stuff, but also weddings, supermarket graphics, digitized mini DVDs, made the first cuts of some video clip, everything. I edited Telefe’s ‘Prisons’, most MTV shows, we made tapes for Nico Repetto. I loved, a lot of rendering, coffee, squeaky, the laburo was great.” With the Internet and YouTube videos began the Julian actor: “Armando ‘Cualca’ with Male I said loose a little the production theme and I was working as an actor. Irregular years, always generating own projects, which is a bit the actor’s thing, that if you don’t generate your own laburo it’s hard to be called.”
About ‘Cualca’, he says: “They are actors who come from the underground and feel like telling certain things, of criticizing, that ends up having more impact on the Internet than on TV, I look at it and I shit my laughter.” From there was born his famous character Caro Pardíaco: “My old man told me that’s the character he was doing going to Cordoba with my sister. I did it again in Cualca at the time that we had more freedom to make characters of our own. Caro saved my life. It came to a peak, we found the world, I still do it in comedy shows. He’s a guy in a wig playing a woman, there’s no thing before that, and I’m amused.” About the musician VS the actor, says: “Luckily you can live in the Kuelgue which is a space where I act, where I play to be the frontman of a band because I didn’t study singing either, so I’m acting, I make characters. But as for laburo is half a bard between producers, the manager of the Kuelgue, the producer of the moment, must assemble an agend. Something happens on stage, half of grace, a unique state, that anyone who is there, is not you in your right mind, no matter how long you’ve been on stage for years and years, there’s always something that switches you.”
There are two well-marked milestones in the Kuelgue race: being Paul McCartney’s opening act and arriving at the Obras Stadium.” We opened the two dates, it was spectacular – it says about the first – We saw the sound tests, very long. On one of the dates we went to the camera and talked for a while. I never credited him, I was with his hands in his pockets and a smile, because I don’t speak inglés. The kids do.” On the Works, he says: “It was strong, very fun to put it together, right at that moment we moved to a new room, where we have a place, an office, where we come together with lights, production, aesthetics, sound. It was like the end of something amateur and the beginning of bigger dates. With a more careful aesthetic, a Kuelgue sound, and very good. They played the roughest ones there and we saw them all, Sumo’s videos, charly’s.”
“In the previous album we went through a lot of nostalgia, of an already lost adolescence, and now the flash of lockdown and ancestors. We tried to find a place among those things, getting more into the bolero, those things we did before, tango folklore, candombe. My ancestors are from Spain and Russia. I went to Asturias, where my grandmother was from. All this on the one hand gives me nostalgia and not being able to believe the age I am and on the other hand I enjoy it full because there is data that I wasn’t 5 years old,” he argues. He goes on: “When you’re an asshole, you have a certain impunity that you don’t measure. Then maybe that adrenaline is lost. If we have to look for her. On stage it’s something I intend to do. I’m going to play this guy and enjoy the music, not get used to anything, or enjoy going to eat with friends, with people at work, enjoying the ride.” I don’t think about the future,” he says, “There is a lot of information in the present, that we come from a catastrophe for our laburo, things are slowly opening up. There’s so much in the present that I find it hard to think about the future. I guess I’ll keep spinning and performing where I can.” Now we’re finishing for a moment. How finished accommodating spotify and Youtube and all this volatile and fast-paced song consumption thing, instead of listening to the full work of the album. It’s starting to come back to that… New things are going to keep coming out,” he continues.
What moment in life makes you Julian Kartun? “I think the Kuelgue is a key point. When we get together this group of repeaters, do you look at ‘Cha cha cha’? Do you smoke joint? All right, here’s a band. It’s not well known about what, but there’s a group of artists in power.” Towards the end of the interview, the box opens. An unexpected challenge begins. Week by week a figure will submit to the living room for dialogue and reflection. And you, are you encouraged to remember what moment clicked on your life?
