Ernesto Oroza Workshop

(english version):

Gean Moreno / Ernesto Oroza
Farside Gallery. Miami
by José Antonio Navarrete / Arte Al Dia International, July 2010

Decoy, the exhibition of works by Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza, gathers together objectual constructions whose conformation and referential potential are the result, in each case, of interactions of varying degree and nature between different disciplines, models and systems of cultural production. I include as examples, in an incomplete list, urban planning, architecture, sculpture, design, interior decoration, museography, essayist literature and publishing activities.

The basic regulator of these interactions is the research work and reflection that both artists have engaged in during the past few years. Established as a methodology, the expansion and enrichment of that work has been put to the test, consecutively, in the different projects implemented within its framework. We would even go further in the case of the example we are addressing: besides shedding light on some aspects of the exhibition, “Notes on the Moiré House (Or, ‘Urbanism’ for Emptying Cities)”, the text authored by both artists and included in the tabloid that accompanies Decoy, represents a moment in the development of a line of thought whose elaborations, previously disseminated, also serve as methodological support for the strategies applied in the show. Likewise, the elements and structures physically displayed in the exhibition space already form part of or are on the way to become configured as a series of conceptual and material sys- tems and tools in an ongoing process of growth that Moreno and Oroza have forged, progressively, under the principle of diagram design. Theirs are, therefore, modelizations with a high level of pragmatic capacity, adaptable to very different installation and operation situations, and with functional possibilities of use outside the field of art, ultimately their place of origin.

In terms of artistic deed, Decoy features a close relationship with the problems of the contemporary city and the ways of inhabiting it, as well as with the production processes, the con- sumption flows and the new social behaviors that characterize the latter, but I would dare say that it communicates interstitially with one of the richest trends of the European avantgarde: the one that put into circulation the notion of the link between art work production life. It is true that, setting itself apart from the celebration of technique and of social redemption that nourished the approaches to the subject elaborated by the Bauhaus and by Russian productivism, what Decoy proposes as strategy is the use of any material and opportunity available for the popular invention of alternatives to the impositions of consumerism; however, of the demythologizing impulse of artistic practice associated to this modern trend, Decoy con- serves what was perhaps its most important trait: the interest in fusing (confusing) art into (with) architecture, design and, in general, the processes of material production.

Perhaps the notion of diagram central to Moreno and Oroza’s current discursive speculations, as we pointed out before might be fitting as metaphor to represent the research exhibition project that both artists are articulating jointly. In that case, Decoy would be something like one of the components or operations of that project: a place to situate oneself inside their diagram.

review (spanish version):
Gean Moreno / Ernesto Oroza
Farside Gallery. Miami
por José Antonio Navarrete / Arte Al Dia International, Julio 2010

Decoy, muestra de Gean Moreno y Ernesto Oroza, reúne construcciones objetuales cuya conformación y potencialidad referencial resulta en cada caso de interacciones de carácter y grado variables entre distintas disciplinas, modelos y sistemas de la producción cultural. Incluyo como ejemplos, en una lista incompleta: el urbanismo, la arquitectura, la escultura, el diseño, la decoración interior, la museografía, la literatura ensayística y la labor editorial.

El regulador básico de esas interacciones es el trabajo de investigación y reflexión que los dos artistas han desplegado durante los últimos años. Constituido como metodología, la expansión y enriquecimiento de este trabajo han sido puestos a prueba, consecutivamente, en los diferentes proyectos realizados dentro de su cauce. Diríamos más, atendiendo al ejemplo que nos atañe: “Notes on the Moiré House (Or, ‘Urbanism’ for Emptying Cities)”, el texto con autoría de ambos incluido en el tabloi- de que acompaña a Decoy, además de iluminar algunos aspectos de la exposición se inserta como un momento del desarrollo de un pensamiento cuyas elaboraciones previamente difundidas también sirven de soporte metodológico a las estrategias que se aplican en ésta. Por igual, los elementos y estructuras dispuestos físicamente en el espacio de exhibición ya forman parte de o se encaminan a configurarse como una serie en crecimiento hasta el presente de sistemas y herramientas conceptuales y materiales que Moreno y Oroza han fraguado, de manera progresiva, bajo el principio del diagrama. Se trata, en consecuencia, de modelizaciones con una elevada capacidad pragmática, adaptables a situaciones de instalación y desenvolvimiento muy diferentes y con posibilidades funcionales de uso fuera del campo del arte, su lugar de origen en última instancia.

En tanto hecho artístico, Decoy se postula en relación estrecha con las problemáticas de la ciudad contemporánea y los modos de habitarla, así como con los procesos de producción, los flujos de consumo y los nuevos comportamientos sociales que caracterizan a la última, pero me atrevería a decir que se comunica intersticialmente con una de las tendencias más ricas de la vanguardia europea: aquélla que puso en circulación la idea del vínculo existente entre arte trabajo producción vida. Es cierto que, a distancia de la celebración de la técnica y la redención social que alimentó los enfoques sobre el tema elaborados por la Bauhaus y el productivismo ruso, lo que Decoy propone como estrategia es el aprovechamiento de cualquier material y oportunidad disponibles para la invención popular de alternativas a las imposiciones de consumo; sin embargo, del impulso desmitificador de la práctica artística asociado a esa tendencia moder- na, Decoy conserva lo que quizás fuera en ella más importante: el interés por fundir (confundir) el arte en (con) la arquitectura, el diseño y, en general, los procesos de la producción material. Tal vez la noción de diagrama central para las especulaciones discursivas actuales de Moreno y Oroza, como señalamos antes podría ser apropiada como metáfora de representación del proyecto de investigación exposición que ambos están articulando conjuntamente. En ese caso, Decoy sería algo así como uno de los componentes u operaciones de ese proyecto: un lugar para situarse en el interior de su diagrama.

- Contemporary artist Ernesto Oroza Re-presents "Archetype Vizcaya." By Janna Lafferty
- Mapping Vizcaya. By Anne Tschida
- A progress report on the ongoing renovations at Miami’s Vizcaya Museum... By Beth Dunlop
- Villa Vizcaya transfigurada: entre la quimera y el diseño. Por Janet Batet
- Ernesto Oroza. Viscaya Museum and Garden. By Janet Batet

- Harpo Foundation

Performance Beyond Miami's Parties
by Paul David Young 12/06/11 Art in America.

The tenth edition of Art Basel Miami Beach was supposed to "reflect a shift toward expanded conceptual, performative and temporal gestures," according to a curatorial statement. But there was little performance at the main fair, nor at the satellite fairs and events, unless you count the parties.

However, two lecture-performances provided a valuable opportunity to experience two sharply contrasting uses of this very current art form: Hennessy Youngman's NADA-sponsored The History of Art Part 1 in the lobby of the Deauville Hotel on Dec. 1, and Ernesto Oroza's Architecture of Necessity at the Fluxus-inspired exhibition "Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds" at LegalArt, curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud, on Dec. 2. The lecture-performance is often an ironic institutional critique of suspect curatorial practices, museum politics or art history. Terence Koh's recurring Art History, for example, involves a rapid-fire series of images that he explains using incomprehensible babble.

Youngman is known for irreverent online videos that combine street talk and glib attacks on specialized art vocabulary, but History of Art Part 1 amounted to a sad commentary on the catchall of "art performance." After several sound checks, the bearded Youngman, wearing a red Spiderman baseball hat, khaki shorts, gold chains, a BET leather bomber jacket and ankle boots, took his seat between some potted palms and began to read as a video projected behind him. Soon he announced that part of the script was missing, disappeared for a while and returned, without any additional material.

Youngman's "history" began with the paper tiger of the artist as a mythic loner, a shaman "bringing magic into the world." He railed briefly against the "MFA industry" of art education for producing "a creative class more like a search engine," though, to the extent that he completed his performance, it was clearly itself a product of Google. He didn't get very far before leaning into some racial comments about the crowd, a theme reprised throughout the performance. "Talking to a bunch of white people in the lobby is kind of weird. I need a lot of alcohol to cope with that." Later, he said he saw "four brown people here" and described the audience as a "sea of milk with some chocolate chips in it."

His refutation of the artist as lone protagonist was a belabored drug joke. He claimed that many historical figures, perplexingly mostly not from the history of art (the Incas, Pizarro, Thomas Edison, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Freud, Richard Pryor), had achieved something not because of "divine Providence" but because they had a "secret ally." Then he trotted out pictures of work by Donald Judd and Carl Andre, facetiously asserting that they made their breakthroughs with the help of cocaine.

At this point, Youngman, bored, abandoned the lecture, turned off the video projection, and spent the rest of his time walking among the crowd, asking audience members general questions. "Are you an artist? A collector?" "Why are you here?" He warned the crowd, "Don't come to NADA if you're an artist because you'll leave very depressed." Youngman didn't explain why that might be true. (In fact, the NADA fair was more vibrant than the main fair.)

Approaching one young woman, he inquired about the quality of his performance. "It's pretty boring, right?" The woman sheepishly admitted, "A little . . . " to which Youngman replied, "Should I just play music?"

He announced, "I'm going to keep doing this until you guys leave. This is called performance art." Indeed, the eager crowd that had gathered was almost entirely gone by the time Youngman stopped the in-crowd interviews. The ending was hardly noticed by the people in the lobby who had wandered off to talk or drink the free Grolsch beer. To paraphrase Youngman, if this is performance art, it does require a lot of alcohol to make it tolerable.

By contrast, the unironic Ernesto Oroza, a Miami-based artist who resided in Cuba until four years ago, took his lecture entirely seriously, at least until he set fire to a pencil using live electric wires attached to a plastic sandal and then tried to operate a fan connected to a rotary telephone.

The pencil ignition was the illuminating conclusion to Oroza's exploration of Cuban domestic innovation in response to the shortages and regulations of the Castro regime. Oroza was pleasantly low key, showing and describing rather than opining or advocating. An artist working with the ephemerality and low-tech predisposition of Fluxus, the raven-haired Oroza fingered his black plastic glasses, while operating his laptop and reading from a folded typed script that he had removed from his pocket.

Oroza explained how Cuban Marxism turns home ownership into a game of cat and mouse. With strict regulation on property ownership and construction, Cubans assert ownership piecemeal, establishing a stairway or extending the floor plan like a tendril to enclose a nearby freestanding wall. You can't build a stairway, so you build ascending platforms that that functions as such, but is nonstandard enough to escape prohibition.

With a slideshow illustrating vernacular Cuban architecture, Oroza showed the absurd but delightful effects of this system. He illustrated its transformative potential through photographs of strange building fragments that he described as "the potential house." A wrought iron handrail of an exterior staircase, breathtakingly irregular, had been created to avoid appearing to be a handrail. It curved in beautiful, organic curls, folding in, one on the other, not a stairway railing after all, but a primal kind of sculpture, site-specific and expressive of an individual will to overcome the impossible.

Oroza considered this "architecture of necessity" to be an instance of the total Cuban social adaptation to the island's economic isolation, the most famous example of which is the country's bizarrely well-preserved fleet of 1950s cars. For Oroza, this Cuban resourcefulness engenders a "pre-cultural sense of eating and sleeping," a state that seemed momentarily desirable.

Oroza's finale coaxed out the showman in him. Installed on the wall in the exhibition space of the superbly installed "Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds" was Oroza's black plastic sandal with two live wires protruding from it. Oroza placed a graphite pencil across the live wires and it burst into flames. He repeated the trick, explaining that this was a common practice in Cuba where there are no matches. Smokers set pencils on fire with electricity to light their cigarettes. (Don't try this at home.) It was a vivid, comic illustration of human perseverance and a nice bit of stage pyrotechnics. After the final explosion, Oroza installed the burnt pencils in a row atop the electrical conduit feeding the socket, where they remain until the exhibition closes, Jan. 31.

Light a fire with your house. Redrawing LegalArt's building. Electrical system, pencil, plastic sandal, text on wall, action. 2011. © Kerry McLaney

DESIGN AND ETHICS
--Gean Moreno

The qualifier “popular” in popular design aims, it seems, to bracket the everyday call-and-response of necessity and ingenuity in order to re-locate an entire field within definitions supported by less pedestrian paradigms. Design, the presence of the qualifier seems to insinuate, is nothing as basic as a practice characterized by gestures through which objects are optimized to respond to immediate needs. We should enhance our definition of the discipline by speaking of it as an autonomous creative field with a clear historical trajectory and stellar practitioners; by recalling the matrix of institutions that legitimize its products; by considering it in relation to markets and mass production; by pumping out reams of text that explain its complex interaction with clients, demographics, and media. We should, in other words, define design exclusively in relation to the shape it has taken as a response to the pressures applied by the material conditions of late capitalism. Anything else would be utopian thinking, academic exegesis, theory, or simply naïveté.

Ernesto Oroza came of age as a designer—and as something other than a designer: a meta-designer, a theoretical designer, an ex-designer (as Marti Giuxé says), an artist—in a context in which the material conditions that have shaped design as the global practice that we know and celebrate didn’t exist. Graduating from Havana’s Instituto Superior de Diseño in 1993, he entered the field at a moment when, due to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet subsidies, Cuba was undergoing its most calamitous economic crisis—the Special Period in Times of Peace. This crisis shut down the production of any new objects on the island and nearly eliminated all imports of non-essential foodstuffs and the like. The lesson of this time, Oroza has argued, is that “Cubans understood that they would have to meet their own needs, as they lived in a country where the State owned all productive capabilities. Urgency placed the individual at the center of the country’s survival.”[1] Scarcity marked the moment. And this opened a gulf between emergent needs and the availability of products that responded to these needs. A broken fan couldn’t be replaced by a new one. The possibility of a one-to-one exchange of objects vanished. As the life of things came to an end, there was nothing to take their place. And so aged and broken objects had to be kept in circulation, readjusted and reconfigured to respond to unexpected demands. A broken phone could serve as the base of a fan; a dinner tray became a TV antennae.

Oroza has devised a number of terms to describe the processes that characterized this period of massive popular design. He has spoken of technological disobedience as a fundamental aspect of it, and he uses the term to highlight the fact that it became a common practice to reroute objects intended to respond to a particular need so that they could respond to a completely different one—one that was not envisioned in the processes of design and production from which it emerged. The phone-as-fan-base and the dinner-tray-as-TV-antennae serve as paradigmatic examples. Rather than user-end empowerment that digital technologies have opened up, what we have here is need trumping intended function. It’s not picking whatever song you want, but using the iPod as a wedge to hold a doorjamb in place. Not selecting the quality of gasoline at the pump, but using the yellow plastic gas tank as a sign for your taxi.

When enough of these “re-formatted” objects begin to appear, enough to significantly change the morphology of a city or a town, it could be said that this popular design has turned into something else: a popular urbanism; a way of irrevocably altering urban texture. In other words, the individual gestures through which objects are synthetically reformatted to respond to emergent needs—that is, the individual gestures of technological disobedience—coalesce into a large collective force that alters the shape of a city. Oroza has called this collectivization and transcendence of individual instances of disobedience familial urbanism. That is, an urbanism that begins with the alterations that take place in each household, responding to the needs of each family. The familial, however, in becoming urbanism is an example of the whole being more than the parts: as urbanism, it becomes a force the effects of which exceed each of the individual instances that comprise it.

For over a decade, Oroza has documented and theorized this new logic of popular design, always looking for precise concepts that express its singularity. The form of design that he has dealt with is often thought of in terms of recycling in the West, but surrendering it too quickly in this kind of discourse occludes one of the things that has been central to Oroza’s project: naming the engine that drives this mode of design, rather than naming its effects. Recycling as such is a process. What has interested Oroza is the root cause: the question of necessity; that is, an understanding of the local material conditions that underscore the emergence of this explosion of popular design. It’s a matter of keeping an eye on the context, on the historical moment. He has said: “Necessity has been stigmatized in Western culture. If you find yourself in need, you are considered weak. If you express demands for these needs to be met, you are considered vulgar. Since the 1990s, Cubans have done violence to this stigma. Each object produced or solution discovered has been a statement of principle.”[2]

Responding to necessity, then, Oroza considers that each of these objects have an ethical dimension: each is, as he says, a statement of principle and freedom, a response against a plummeting in the quality of living conditions, against a disintegrating social fabric, and, lastly, against an eroding urban texture. This is why Oroza refuses to participate in the discussion of Havana as a ruin. Such a discourse takes a sweeping view of the city, focusing on its dilapidated surfaces, and ignoring the ground-level and “hidden” gestures of its inhabitants, the new behaviors and altered objects that optimize their responses to immediate needs, to pressures that emerge from existing and local material conditions. Behind the crumbling buildings of the city, Oroza argues, there is another interior city, or city of interiorities: one of architectural up-datings and object re-designs that speak the truth of their moment and the ethics of their producers.

[1] Moreno, Gean, “Object as Index: Ernesto Oroza in Conversation with Gean Moreno,” Art Papers, May-June, 2008, p.25

[2] Moreno, Ibid., p.25

Ernesto Oroza: el espacio relacional de todas las cosas del mundo
ADRIANA HERRERA

•  Ernesto Oroza (La Habana, 1968) exhibe actualmente la muestra de videos y fotografías Enemigo Provisional en Art@Work. En 2007 obtuvo la beca Guggenheim por su proyecto Arquitectura de la necesidad que indagaba en la reconfiguración ocurrida en el interior y exterior de los hábitats de La Habana. Tras graduarse de diseñador industrial durante el Período Especial había enfrentado la imposibilidad material de producir obras sofisticadas y descubrió en cambio que existía un impresionante “período de diseño popular masivo”, según escribió el crítico y artista Gean Moreno, con quien ha creado obras colectivas explorando un similar tipo de práctica en el Little Haiti de Miami.
Viendo su oficio sobrepasado por un entorno en el que la gente trasformaba sus viviendas con inesperadas envolturas o modificaciones inusuales para resolver la escasez habitacional; y en el que también se fabricaban objetos con lo que había a mano, improvisando soluciones frente a la carencia; renunció a sus ideas académicas para absorber las prácticas de la estética y vida popular.
Se convirtió en un “ex diseñador”  –como lo llamó Moreno, apropiándose del término acuñado por Martí Guixé-, que más que crear, acopia objetos de arte encontrados que fotografía, usa como patrones, o como ingeniosas instalaciones de solución espacial fabricadas con recursos “pobres” como baldes, cajas de cartón, piedra o plástico. Pero sobre todo, funcionan como artefactos de pensamiento para revelar zonas de interrelación en sombra.
Su práctica artística refleja cómo la  necesidad puede propiciar en Cuba el despliegue de una recursividad orgánica, marcada por los ritmos y las urgencias de la gente. Pero lejos de caer en el romanticismo que hace exóticos esos objetos caseros ingeniosos - una lámpara de querosene hecha con una botella de leche-, reafirma que no se renuncia al deseo del objeto “verdadero”. Como un Aladino contemporáneo, Oroza cambiaba de hecho, un ventilador nuevo por el que alguien había creado con un disco de acetato para “resolver” su carencia, y lo usaba como un readymade de la arquitectura de la necesidad.
Oroza demuestra hasta qué punto diseño y arquitectura, asumidos desde la supervivencia cotidiana, pueden desafiar la ética de un sistema que reprime la iniciativa individual, pero también la de otro que conduce a un consumo de cosas hechas y no necesarias a fin de someterlo a un omnipotente poder financiero.
Su obra no está en las piezas, sino en la intermediación social. Es una mirada apostada en los espacios emocionales –del deseo, del miedo a la escasez, de la posesión simbólica, de la necesidad de expansión- que se activan en las relaciones de las personas con los objetos y arquitecturas con los que viven. Su estética relacional se apropia de las prácticas populares para erosionar los lugares comunes que saturan las ideologías del poder.
De modo coherente con una programación ligada a la observación cultural de la migración y de los desplazamientos territoriales y de visión en Miami, Art@Work exhibe el video y las fotos de Enemigo Provisional. Las piezas registran el estado en que queda un set de objetos caseros tras ser usados en los campos de tiro improvisados que Fidel Castro autorizó montar con escopetas de cacería amarradas a una barra. El gobierno las suministró conminando a la gente a entrenarse a disparar para enfrentar la amenaza de una invasión imperialista. Los campos provisionales, creados para una espera hipotética, funcionan como negocios improvisados en estructuras donde se cuelga cualquier objeto inútil que pueda ser baleado. Balones desinflados, muñecas viejas, piezas sueltas, reciben una descarga de agresividad popular obviamente más conectada con la liberación de una energía de frustración social, que con su supuesto propósito de entrenamiento. Cada objeto agujereado y fotografiado cumple una función que desplaza la inmovilidad de una sociedad donde todos están a la espera de lo que no ha de venir, por una catarsis tan absurda o grotesca como el estado en que quedan estos blancos que hablan no sólo de la extensión del simulacro sino de las estrategias de desplazamiento. El “enemigo” externo provisional ayuda a acatar la inacabable espera.
Oroza propuso la “desobediencia tecnológica” como una vía para remover la inmovilidad que imponía en Cuba determinó una forma de vivir en la transición; pero también el perenne tránsito hacia el progreso que en el capitalismo acaba por obviar, en aras de una sofisticación tecnológica, “los paradigmas de vida humana”.
Otro video exhibido pertenece al archivo llamadoDesobediencia tecnológica y muestra la aparición de Fidel Castro intentando promocionar la ventaja de productos chinos para el consumo, en un momento en que masivamente la gente diseñaba con cualquier cosa objetos de necesidad. La reproducción de esa imagen del líder político que parece encarnar un vendedor callejero armando cuentos sobre el producto que intenta vender, evidencia el límite de las ficciones sociales y erosiona el poder discursivo de un sistema a partir de la visión de los objetos.
En síntesis, estas obras encontradas que interpelan los límites de las ficciones sociales, burlan los estereotipos de exaltación o detracción del consumo del comunismo y del capitalismo, y proponen la formulación de otra ética en la relación del hombre y las cosas.

ESPECIAL/EL NUEVO HERALD
Adriana Herrera es escritora, curadora, y crítica de arte. Colabora con galerías y museos, y asesora publicaciones especializadas.
‘Enemigo Provisional’ de Ernesto Oroza en Art@Work, 1245 SW 87 Ave. Hasta el 21 de septiembre. Charla del artista y visita guiada el jueves 15 a las 7 p.m.
adrianaherrerat@gmail.com

Atajos. Objetos especulativos para la Habana. Ernesto Oroza para Laboratorio Maldeojo, 1999-2003
Alcancia Publica (version para Alamar)

Dándole pira al dolor...
por Silvia Llanes Torres, 2003

La producción del Laboratorio Mal de Ojo se inserta – quizás con un mayor sentido de conciencia (1) – en el conjunto de propuestas realizadas por el grupo, lamentablemente escaso, de diseñadores llamados a realizar la “revolución” visual del diseño cubano contemporáneo.

La mayoría de ellos provienen de un espacio académico muy definido, el cual los prepara para crear y producir, pero la realidad los enfrenta a una industria “sorda, ciega y muda”, incapaz de percibir  la renovación que se le propone. Ante esta dolorosa realidad que ciñe al diseñador cubano a espacios muy específicos: su casa, las artes plásticas, la ambientación de interiores, el diseño gráfico y las ferias, preferentemente; Mal de Ojo Laboratorio, dispone un destino muy diferente para su pensamiento. El producto que crea es tan resistente a ser encasillado, a ser constreñido o manipulado como el mismo objeto que lo inspira. La autenticidad de su génesis, la responsabilidad de su discurso y la absoluta originalidad en el medio donde se crea lo salva y legitima.(2)

Las frases elegidas y las formas empleadas han ajustado un conjunto de símbolos que los hace reconocibles: su producto no es el resultado de un escenario diseñado; en ellos desaparecen todos los atisbos de puesta en escena, muestran una realidad tangible, susceptible de ser graficada, ilustrada con esos objetos aparentemente imposibles que Mal de Ojo propone, pero que esa misma realidad ha posibilitado.

La estética del cubano medio – y no sólo en los últimos quince años – ha sido la de la subsistencia, ilustrada a través de la provisionalidad. Como salvamento moral se asume la idea de  “todo lo que ven aquí pasará”, pero la provisionalidad  se instala, se aferra al único espacio posible para trascender: el espacio objetual cubano. Ante las dificultades históricas, las penurias económicas y la incomunicación, el medio en que vivimos proyecta nuestra propia respuesta de supervivencia. Esa fuente de ideas es la que ha servido al equipo M-O para definir la creación y exponer su propia estética, la de los objetos de la resistencia. Ella posee una lírica original, propia, capaz de sublimar los objetos que tienden a vincularse al desperdicio, el sobrante o la solución provisional. La trascendencia de esta provisionalidad está en la capacidad con que han podido acercarse a sus contemporáneos, citarlos, reflejarlos e ilustrarlos.

Nuestra lógica industrial constreñida por una realidad desindustrializada ha encontrado una respuesta popular y viva: la del objeto que producido al margen de la industria, crea la suya propia, una respuesta que humaniza el acto del consumo e intenta cubrir las espectativas de todas las necesidades posibles (3). Estos son los objetos de la esperanza, los padres espirituales de Mal de Ojo, cuya producción, también situada al margen de la cultura industrial, disfrutan de una autenticidad validada por esa contradicción entre la marginalidad que los inspira y la fuente material que los hace posible. Esta marginalidad relativa, está en el uso del subproducto de la industria, y la posibilidad de darle un nuevo sentido, más útil y centrado en las necesidades reales del consumidor.

El acto de la reparación, también institucionalizado y legitimado por nuestro medio, encuentra en M-O, una actitud de creación a partir de la enmienda, del arreglo y de la apropiación creativa y humana de cuanto material, herramienta, objeto o espacio sea posible de tomar. Los verdaderos objetos de la resistencia, la posición segura de que aquí, lo que no hay es que morirse. Diseño de la Conciencia, producto de misioneros del diseño, reflejo de la cultura y la historia cubanas. Identidad y derecho a no dejarse llevar por el dolor, incendiarlo, echarlo fuera de casa, sacarlo del espacio en que debemos vivir y crear, porque sin lugar a dudas, Venceremos mami, te lo juro...

(1)   Me refiero a una serie de propuestas del equipo, de connotación claramente social, que superan todo el trabajo realizado hasta ahora por sus integrantes, y más aún momentos anteriores de sus proyectos individuales o vinculados a otros creadores. Los Atajos al placer son verdaderos manifiestos de colectividad y esperanza, hablan más por sí solos que todas las consignas enarboladas a favor de la integridad y la unidad humanas. La posibilidad de un megadiseño, de una propuesta urbana del objeto y la unión a través de la posesión y el acto interactivo de la comunidad con el objeto rayan en la utopía; a la vez constituyen un sueño posible de ser realizado y quizás hasta de ser activado en beneficio y función del hombre.

(2) Para una real comprensión del “mito inspirativo” del laboratorio, pudieran recomendarse un grupo de textos, publicados o no, ahora mismo al alcance relativo puede consultarse “La création populaire a Cuba, objets réinventés”, de Ernesto Oroza y Penélope de Bozzi, texto que conforma, después de un arduo trabajo de investigación,  un catálogo de la creación popular cubana de los últimos años y su respuesta a las necesidades de consumo.

(3) Los objetos de M-O más que propuestas de diseño deben entenderse como tesis. Manifiestos de identidad y conciencia, pueden ser realizados o no, pueden ser puestos en uso – y ojalá así sea – o quedar sobe el papel, pero constituyen un llamado, una alerta a los derechos del hombre actual y su relación con los objetos que produce y consume, la consulta de “El confort es legal”  es insustituible, puesto que ilustra esta tesis, la del derecho a la libertad y la idea propia de la belleza.

A propósito de la belleza en M-O, la observación de su producción arquitectónica, industrial y gráfica, siempre me recuerda una tesis que he usado reiteradamente, aquella idea de Max Ernts, “la belleza será convulsiva o no será”; y la posibilidad de asumir lo que la mayoría considera grotesco e incluso kistch: la violencia y el pastiche, para finalmente lograr un objeto de especialísima potencialidad  poética, como puede evidenciarse en la Vitrina Revolucionaria (aérea, transparente, casi “élfica”) o en el potente resultado de la ambientación del Local del CDR.

Sermon
Sunday September 30, 2007

“OBJECTS OF NECESSITY!”
The Reverend Dr. E. Neil Hunt
The United Church of Marco Island

JEREMIAH 18:1-11

The Potter and the Clay
18The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 2‘Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.’ 3So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. 4The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.
5 Then the word of the Lord came to me: 6Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. 7At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, 8but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. 9And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, 10but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it. 11Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.

LET US PRAY:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to You O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Recycling!
When Sharon and I came down to Marco Island last fall, recycling was one of many new things that we had to learn.  Oh sure we did some of it up in Novi, but not nearly to the extent that we do it down here.  
When it comes to recycling, Florida and Collier Co. are way ahead of Michigan!
We recycle newspapers.
We recycle bottles.
We recycle our cans, as long as they have been rinsed out.
Sometimes we recycle old batteries and we turn in empty computer printer cartridges.
But how many of us have ever done it with old rotary-dial telephones?
Not many I would guess.  Junk like that just gets thrown in the trash.
If we lived in Cuba, however, the story would be different.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s, the economic crisis in Cuba deepened.
Poverty became pandemic, and Cubans were forced to engage in some truly inventive recycling.
Since they had nothing new to work with, they found creative ways to make something out of nothing.
One person took an old rotary-dial telephone and turned it into an electric fan.
Another took an empty plastic bottle, one that used to hold antifreeze, and transformed it into a sign for his taxicab.
Still another person took a little plastic bear, a child’s old squeeze toy, and attached it upside down to a set of bicycle handlebars so that it would become a horn for his bike.

NOW THAT IS WHAT YOU CALL REAL RECYCLING!

Not simply putting old newspapers out on the edge of the road in the recycling can on garbage day!
This is the kind of reinvention that stands as a true tribute to creativity.
And there is no waste!
It is this kind of appreciation for the recycling potential of the old,
the tired,
the tried and true,
for which the prophet Jeremiah gained a new appreciation when God suggested that he take a look at what was happening in the potter’s house in Jerusalem.

The people of Israel were on a perilous path of perversity and injustice and idolatry, and Jeremiah could see that they were likewise on a collision course with judgment and exile.
But then he saw what the potter was doing, and he listened to the word of God.
Jeremiah began to see that divine creativity might allow for a very different outcome.
Jeremiah said, “I went down to the potter’s house and there he was working at his wheel.  
The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.”
The potter did not give up when the first vessel was spoiled, but he reworked it into something that was good and useful, like the Cuban recyclers who turned a telephone into a fan, or a plastic bottle into a taxi sign.
Then the word of God came to Jeremiah:  “Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done?...Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.”
God makes it very clear, I think, that God can smash a spoiled pot and throw it in the trash, or God can recycle it into something that is good and useful and pleasing to God!
The key, says God, is repentance.

THE FATE OF THE VESSEL DEPENDS ON ITS WILLINGNESS TO CHANGE OR TO BE CHANGED!

Jeremiah, in his visit to the potter’s house, sees that God does not want to trash us, GOD WANTS TO RECYCLE US!

Although God describes God’s self as a potter who is bringing judgment against Israel, God also stresses that there is a recycling option that is always open, it was open to Israel and it is open to each one of us, “amend your ways and your doings.”
Repentance is the key, turning ourselves around, and beginning to work in the way of God.
If we make a move away from that which separates us from God and move back toward God, we will find that God is willing to rework us into something that is remarkably fresh and creative and new!

GOD WANTS TO USE US, NOT TO DISCARD US.  
GOD WANTS THERE TO BE NO WASTE!

Yes, indeed, sometimes we all feel like old anti-freeze bottles, empty and dirty and cracked, but we don’t have to end up in the trash.
God is not the God of the landfill, anxious to get rid of anything that is ruined, spoiled, damaged goods.  
Instead, God wants to rework us, recycle us, and turn us into something that is pleasing and useful and good.
The next time you feel bad or useless and too far from God to do any good, just remember:
Noah was a drunk,
Abraham was too old,
Isaac was a daydreamer,
Jacob was a liar,
Joseph was abused,
Moses had a stuttering problem,
Gideon was afraid,
Sampson had long hair and was a womanizer,
Rahab was a prostitute,
Jeremiah and Timothy were too young,
David had an affair and was a murderer,
Elijah was suicidal,
Isaiah preached naked, (no wonder someone invented the pulpit!)

Jonah ran from God,
Naomi was a widow,
Job went bankrupt,
John the Baptist ate bugs,
Peter denied Jesus the Christ, (not once, but three times)
The disciples all fell asleep while praying,
Martha worried about everything,
The Samaritan woman was divorced, more than once,
Paul was too religious,
Timothy had an ulcer,
AND LAZARUS WAS DEAD!    

So, no more excuses!  God can use each one of us to our full potential! And the church can use us also!
But we have to make the first move, and turn ourselves around.
Actually, that is the second move.

God makes the first one, by inviting us to return, reminding us that God’s love is constant, begging us to amend our ways.
That is God’s move!

So, as a people, we need to make the second move:  to turn around and face the One who is eager for reconciliation.
So why is this “turning around” move such a tough one for us to make?
Part of the problem is that ANY KIND OF CHANGE IS A HUGE CHALLENGE FOR US!
Even when we know,  WHEN WE KNOW, that a change, a move, a journey, would be good for us, we resist it!
Resistance: it is part of the psychology of change.
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy” wrote the French writer Anatole France, “for what we leave behind is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.”
That is why we prefer to stay in “retail therapy,” the clinical, if not more palatable term for shopping, guilt trips as it were, because it feels good to go out and buy the latest fashion or the most up-to-date electronic gadget.  It is hard to repent of gossip, because it feeds our ego to be in a position of superiority, with control over a tidbit of scandalous information.
It is hard to repent of gambling, for example, because we get such an adrenaline rush from making a bet and pursuing a jackpot.
It is hard to move away from other addictive habits because of their appeal to our baser selves.
As much as we might want to make changes, we know that our repentance will leave us feeling somewhat deflated.
When we turn away from such sensual delights, we leave behind a part of ourselves.
In short, we don’t change our ways, because, we don’t really want to.
That’s it!  We don’t want to, we don’t feel like it!
Let’s admit it.  Rebellion and being in control, can be fun.

WE DON’T WANT TO GIVE IT UP.  SO WE DON’T!

Another barrier to repentance is FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN.
To do an about face and head in a whole new and different direction, which is the core meaning of repentance, is a truly daunting proposition.
After traveling on one path for weeks or months or even years, it can be disorienting and frightening to spin around and move in a radically different direction.
We have to wonder: Am I really going to enjoy living a life of simplicity after years of maxing out my credit cards?
Am I ever going to feel any heart pounding excitement if I focus on service projects instead of slot machines?
Repentance is the first step in becoming a whole new creation, like a squeeze toy changing into a bicycle horn, and it is not clear from the beginning that any of us is going to enjoy the transformation.

Yet, while we fear the unknown, we often come, eventually, to loathe the known.
We are tired of the despair. We are tired of feeling useless.
Tired of living in a spider hole of depression and meaninglessness.
We are weary of our search for guiltless pleasures.
We tire of our weakness, we long for redemption.
WE WOULD REALLY LIKE A NEW AND FRESH START!

Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger calls this the “misery index.”
In his negotiations in the Middle East, he argued that people will come to the table when the cost of conflict becomes too high.
At the potter’s house, we come to the table, the potter’s wheel, when we understand that the cost of living away from God is just too high, and that only a reworking, a refashioning at the hands of the Master Potter will work to turn our lives around.
The Good News is that God is ready, in fact God is eager to take:
What is broken and fix it,
What is wounded and heal it,
What is defiled and cleanse it,
What is bitter and sweeten it,
What is impure and purify it,
What is incomplete and make it whole,
What is ugly and turn it into something that is beautiful!

With God, there is no waste!
Anyone and anything can be transformed by the power of God, changed as dramatically as a telephone turning into an electric fan.

The story of recycling in Cuba has at least one more lesson to teach each one of us as we ponder the work that God does in reshaping our lives.

Back in 1994, a Cuban designer named Ernesto Oroza first noticed the creative reinventions of his fellow citizens, their fans, signs, and horns, and he gave these creations a special name: “Objects of necessity.”

He said, “The objects of necessity represent the world I live in, and they express our desire to invent and not let ourselves be overwhelmed by our problems.”
Objects of necessity!
What a great term to apply to ourselves, as we come to see ourselves as lumps of clay in the hand of our potter God.
We are the creations that God has chosen to advance the reign of God in this world.  We are the clear signs of God’s desire to invent new solutions to the problems that arise in the course of human history.
It really doesn’t make sense for us to resist the changes that God is making as God recycles us for God’s purposes, because there is nothing more satisfying than being “objects of necessity,” key components of God’s world changing movement of love and peace and justice.

When God recycles, there is never any waste.

Only forgiven and reinvented people who are good and useful and pleasing both to God and to others.

Each and every one of us is God’s “Objects of Necessity!”  Amen.

Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza. Miami-Dade Public Library System - Main Library, Miami. June 10, 2010.

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Curatorial Statement:
Driftwood - Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Miami-Dade Public Library System - Main Library
101 West Flagler Street  Miami, FL 33130

Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza’s collaborative works question, test and “act out” ideas about the function of and tensions between objects, cities, exhibition spaces, art, architecture and design. Often visually simple and sparse, their projects for exhibition spaces have many layers.

These projects challenge the premise of design and artistic production, complicating our understanding of the relationships between makers and users. How do cultural influences, economic necessity, or any number of social, natural or political forces lead to new and unanticipated uses of places and things? What can we learn from the way ordinary people make use of milk crates, stereo speakers, buckets? What do we understand about changes in a city by looking at its salvage yards and civic auditoriums? Who or what makes a particular use or design official?

The artists write about these observations and publish them in newsprint tabloids that they distribute publicly as well as in art journals for specialized audiences. The ideas in these texts inform their visual/design projects; the tabloids become part of installations. These ideas also trouble the connections between the materials in the gallery or art journal—validating spaces—and their counterparts in the city and society outside.

The objects and materials in Driftwood act as double (or triple, or quadruple) agents. The wallpaper, screen structures, event posters and glass “paintings” extend or bend the energies at work in a Miami salvage yard and urban patterns of use: they are both art objects and salvaged/functional materials. They also modify the space, laying bare its functions: an institution has decided to use a space designed to be an auditorium or meeting space as an art gallery.

The patterned wallpaper is also a vehicle for discussing ideas. It folds into a tabloid containing an essay with images, Thirteen Ways to Look at a Salvage Yard, and a page that collapses into yet another publication, Freddy: examining the process by which a mass-produced object gets “derailed” for new uses. You’re invited to pick these up and take them with you—to read or to use for something else.

Denise Delgado.
Curator.Art Services and Exhibitions
Miami-Dade Public Library System

Art in America
Performance Beyond Miami's Parties
by Paul David Young 12/06/11

Exhibition views

Object as Index: Ernesto Oroza in conversation with Gean Moreno

In Florian Borchmeyer and Matthias Hentschler’s lop-sided film Havana: The New Art of Making Ruins, 2006, Cuban writer António José Ponte, one of the protagonists, fires up his brain’s associative engine. Eruditely crossfading from Thomas Mann to Georg Simmel to Jean Cocteau, Ponte reveals himself a modem initiate in the ancient discipline of ruinology- like Walter Benjamin and Robert Smithson. One of the most interesting proposals he puts forth-interesting at least for those of us who know fantasy’s edges always cut across the real—is that Havana, the dilapidated Havana of today, is the result of the coming imperialist invasion on which the regime’s rhetoric has pivoted for decades. Waiting for this invasion, the city transformed itself into besieged territory. Haunted by its future destruction, the city destroyed itself.

Ernesto Oroza’s work seems to unfold against this kind of sweeping and romantic narrative. Instead of re-editing the establishing shots of a dilapidated Havana that have now become icons around the globe, 0roza is interested in the other Havana- the place that can be discerned in the quotidian textures of popular design and improvisational ingenuity, in the everyday transactions that take place in order to satisfy immediate needs. This Havana exists in the activities of its inhabitants, and functions almost as a foil to the other Havana, which we can no longer disassociate from grand historical trajectories.

Coming of age with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet subsidies that kept the island economically afloat, Oroza belongs to a generation of artists who emerged with the Special Period—Cuba's deepest economic crisis. Unlike many of his peers, however, he wasn't brought up through the island's centralized system of art academies. Instead, he was educated as an industrial designer. Oroza eventually found in the artworld an accommodating context, after he shifted his interest from actually producing and designing artifacts to documenting the realities of the island as they manifest themselves in the objects created by lay folk attempting to better their lives.

Oroza's background becomes important when one begins to consider the oddity of his project, in comparison to those of his peers in the Cuban artworld. Unlike them, he has never found a need to produce autonomous objects, self-contained sculptures or photographs. On occasion, he has said that he doesn't really know how to put his resume together, considering that what would go in it—exhibitions—is but a small part of what he does, an offshoot of a project that has more to do with collecting and organizing information. He has always approached things with a documentarian’s eye. This is evident in the research projects that he has conducted, in the books that he has published, and in the photographic archives and collections of objects bought in the street that he has amassed. But it is also true of the individual, sculpture-like objects and videos that he often presents in exhibitions. They reproduce the logic of popular design enacted in every household in Cuba in the 199os, taking on an indexical quality, pointing to real socioeconomic conditions. In some ways, he is like the European conceptualists of the 1960s, who sought to develop materialist practices by representing what the world had to offer in order to articulate critical positions on the way things were. In this, a seemingly distant figure like Marcel Broodthaers may be more of a predecessor for Oroza—taking into account obvious contextual differences— than installation artists such as Lázaro Saavedra, Ricardo Brey, José Bédia, and Tonel, who launched a tradition which his peers are carrying on.

Gean Moreno: There is a discourse that revolves around Havana as a ruin, as what is left after certain historical processes have run their course. Your work refuses to contribute to this discourse and, instead, proposes that such a reading is applied from the outside, and that the city has its own internal history.

Ernesto Oroza: There are really two discourses that connect around the idea of the ruin while they stand ideologically opposed to one another. The first considers it necessary to return the city to its original functional and symbolic values. On one hand, it seems a criticism of the existing political system, whose inefficiency brought about the destruction of Havana. On the other, it is aligned with official interests insofar as it hands the city over to tourism, and reaps the benefits on the way. This is the position of architects and conservators.
The second notion of the city as a ruin comes from the outside. People see the city as kidnapped. Very little has been built, officially, in fifty years. As a result, the city represents the political system that was deposed in 1959. But this perception—of the city as a ruin—empties Havana of its inhabitants; it negates the efforts of families to make habitable a city whose population has grown without any official rise in housing capacity.
As such, in addition to an internal history, there is also a city that has grown inwardly. Families have found solutions to meet their needs. These adaptations have turned Havana into a continuum of internal transformations. The phenomenon is so widespread that we can speak of a familial urbanism, set in motion from every Cuban household. That is the city that interests me and that produces my work.

GM: This widespread phenomenon exists, then, at a quotidian level. Your interest lies in popular design that aims at the immediate betterment of living, responding to real-time needs, without historical pretence or institutional legitimization.

E0: Exactly. Let me explain the context. As I was finishing my studies in industrial design, Cuba entered the most profound economic crisis in its history, due to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Cubans understood that they would have to meet their own needs, as they lived in a country where the State owned all productive capabilities. Urgency placed the individual at the center of the country's survival. People became aware of their real needs and were freed of prejudices and banalities.
Necessity has been stigmatized in Western culture. If you find yourself in need, you are considered weak. If you make demands to meet these needs, you are considered vulgar. Since the 1990s, Cubans have done violence to this stigma. Each object produced or solution discovered has been a statement of principle. I've called this state of awareness and freedom Statement of Necessity and what it produces Objects of Necessity.

As a cultural producer, I wasn't spared those penurious conditions and I felt a part of the productive current that they engendered. I began to document the ideas and techniques that I saw everywhere. The objects produced at the time expressed provisionality, a utopian pragmatism that is quite paradoxical. We all thought that the crisis would end quickly and we decided to make provisional objects. These would substitute the ones that belonged to a time with a higher standard of living. They were objects that would disappear with the conditions that engendered them. I found it important to document them. These objects embody an ethics and a modesty that are the opposite of the ostentatious presumptions of innovation and transcendence that are pushed on us in design school.

GM: You said that you found it important to document the objects that were emerging in light of the conditions brought about by the economic crisis. This reminds me of a concept that you've used before: the object-documentary. An object that, like a film documentary, records an existing reality instead of inventing a new one—as traditional art objects presumably do.

E0: I became aware of the processes I was using. They became more interesting than any theme. All my recent production has followed one of two processes. The decorative documentary would be the first. I figured out that the placement of a series of collected objects in an art space complicates their documentary function without losing the value of the document altogether. I was attracted by the ambiguity between display and sculpture. A typical work, here, would be Untitled. Decorative Documentary, 2005, made of metal strainers. On the one hand, it is just a cold presentation of collected objects. On the other, it materializes an abstract sculpture that establishes a relationship with the space that houses it.
My interest in simulating materials like Stone and wood can also be seen to belong to this process. In this type of intervention, however, the space of the simulation—its support—is crucial. For instance, when I selected the visitors’ bathroom at the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba, and covered it with a simulation of wood—for which an expert was hired—I introduced vernacular taste and know-how into a legitimate art space. I also managed to make people disclose their repulsion for popular practices, with their inevitable reading of the bathroom as covered with excrement.
At the Ludwig, I also placed a collection of decorative objects that I purchased throughout the city. They functioned simultaneously as documents of a popular aesthetic production and as decor.
My other process is the multiple documentary: the placement of two or more documents on a single support. Disparate associations are established among the documents, allowing the information to be interpreted in unforeseen ways. Most difficult in this case is the choice of material to be documented, as I don't want to start with a preconceived notion of how things will end up. For this reason, I turn one of the documents into the support by emphasizing some of its formal, physical, and conceptual traits. For my next project of this type, I want to juxtapose some staples of Cubans’ diet with the water and electricity conduit systems that they use to transform their houses. The tubes will be filled with the food.

GM: Your de-emphasis of the autonomous art object has allowed you to maintain an open practice. Along with objects and installations for exhibition, your work also consists of a series of researches that find their final forms in books, zines, lectures, photographic archives, and collections of objects. As such, your work is more a discursive field than a group of things.

E0: I work with disparate materials and information that I organize into diverse conceptual frameworks, such as books, displays, and even my own drawers. I'm more interested in developing systems to articulate the information that I process than in producing “definitive" works. I neither desire nor need to produce objects with the expected attributes of autonomy, authorship, originality, unity or physical limits, that is, the qualities intrinsic to the traditional artwork.
In fact, when my work is presented in traditional exhibition spaces, I appropriate interventionist logics from other disciplines, such as interior design and architecture. On occasion, I also use models and principles of production from the fields that I study, and extrapolate on them for my own practice. I am a pragmatist. Just as someone uses a telephone as a base for a rehabilitated fan, I use diagrams that others have created to illustrate phenomena foreign to my field in order to explain my ideas.
Such transaction allows the ethics, the phenomena, and the essence of the foreign field to seep into my work—this very stimulating. I don’t feel the need to define the limits or the Reading of my work. Only when it is at risk of being consumed does it assume a precise shape, but only to dissolve afterwards. It’s as if every one of its components always returned to its source.

2008. Moreno, Gean. “Object as Index: Ernesto Oroza in conversation with Gean Moreno” Art Papers, May/June p.24.

Forces of Radical Pragmatism and Pirate Ethics:
Brian Kuan Wood on the Work of Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza
Paletten Nr 1 2011

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Driftwood - Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Miami-Dade Public Library System - Main Library
101 West Flagler Street  Miami, FL 33130

Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza’s collaborative works question, test and “act out” ideas about the function of and tensions between objects, cities, exhibition spaces, art, architecture and design. Often visually simple and sparse, their projects for exhibition spaces have many layers...