The years spent in Europe fuelled Borges’s desire to introduce avant-garde aesthetics to Argentina, as seen in his role founding the two iterations of the magazine, Proa. In addition to verbal material, visual images were also prominent in the magazine. Anonther key point of reference in the cultural sphere of mid-1920s Buenos Aires was the magazine, ’Martin Fierro’, to which Borges contributed. The spirit of questioning the old and seeking innovation left its mark on Borges as both critic and creative writer.

In Borges’s poem, ’A Rafael Cansions Assens’, the image of the Segovia Viaduct in Madrid is a record of the years he spent in that city and of his brief but intense involvement with Ultraism. A member of the literary scene also represented in ’Luces de Bohemia’ by Ramón María del Valle Inclan, the benevolent, heterodox figure of Cansinos Assens was never wholly in tune with the aesthetic programme of Ultraism. Similarly, Borges would disown his Ultraist roots but never lost his admiration and affection for Cansinos Assens. In the long run, the experience from 1919 to 1922 of life in Madrid, Majorca, and Seville was stimulating and seminal in that it allowed Borges to experiment with techniques and themes he would later develop in his work.

Back in Buenos Aires in 1921 after time spent in Europe, Borges set about creating a mythology for his native city in the throes of modernisation. The ideological dimension of this project was ’criollismo’: a reconstruction of a city half-imagined, half remembered. Through the workings of metonymy, Buenos Aires also doubled for the nation of Argentina. Key texts in this regard include ’The Complaint of all Criollos’ and the volume of poetry, ’Fervour of Buenos Aires’, also echoed in the later poem, ’The Mythological Foundation of Buenos Aires’. In a comparative context, Borges’s work is more in tune with contemporary architect, Alberto Prebisch, than the painter, Xul Solar.