in coauthorship with Disbel Roque Bolaño
Sand of the construction and cardboard templates shaped like lattice.
The
action was about interfering in an outdoors parking for cars in Vedado,
Havana City. Artists execute an exercise of reaffirmation of patterns
in which when the external interferences (cars) affected the drawn
patterns, they returned and rescued of the original design of the
affected area. Each intervention created the opposite effect of the
desired one, converting the design in an amorphous and deformed object.
Microtopia
is a site spesific action in which artists perform an urban
intervention for 10 hours. A design is created based on patterns whose
maximum composition reached a scale (15m). The materials used were
construction sand and cardboard stencils in the shape of lattices. This
gesture in an open-air parking lot was a direct dialogue with the
architectural constructions that surrounded the site, mostly capitalist
aesthetic constructions. The patterns that composed the work, alluded in
their visuality to the socialist realism type buildings.
The
lattices are a series of monotonous decorations that compose abstract
images in the multi-family buildings. The artists took these patterns to
create a kind of mandala that assumed these images as "sacred" within a
decadent socialist process. The daily flow of cars on the site was not
affected, therefore, the interaction gradually caused the created
structure to lose the form it was intended to maintain. The performative
action was based on the continuous reaffirmation of an image that
during the process was deconstructed at the same time that, in a gesture
of reaffirmation of patterns, it was attempted to continue building
without stopping.
The decomposition of an ideology, of a specific
type of social system that at some point in history divided the world
into two totally opposite poles, is today a concern for the citizens who
still inhabit the last bunkers of the Socialist system. These
countries, after acts of ideological resistance, try to constantly
reaffirm and ratify their position before the world, an exercise that
has become a crutch. The assumption of globalization and integration is
inevitable, therefore, the mechanisms used by socialist systems appeal
to capitalist instruments in order to survive.
