Ernesto Oroza Workshop

Tabloids are series of newspapers that are produced in relation to specific exhibitions. One side of the newspaper pages, patterns (usually determined by elements within the exhibitions) are printed. These are used as wallpapers to designate particular spaces within the exhibition sites. The rest ofthe newspapers are used to present materials that in some way expand or question the conceptual scope of the exhibition.
Gean Moreno & Ernesto Oroza. 2008
Visit: http://thetabloid.org/

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Editing Havana- Stories of Popular Housing
Maja Asaa, Mira Kongstein and Ernesto Oroza
with photographs by Frederikke Friderichsen
ISBN: 9788791984174
Published by Aristo Bogforlag 2011
17x24 cm, 224p

RÉACTIONS EN CHAÎNE

Interview with Ernesto Oroza
By Baptiste Menu

(The english version of this interview was published in the special tabloid printed for the exhibition Ernesto Oroza. Architecture of Necesitty, INOVA, 2011) (French version)

Baptiste Menu What you call “technological disobedience” is questioning the life cycle of western products, by multiplying the industrial objects’ length of use up to the limit of their possibilities of use. This system is now possible thanks to the reconsideration of the industrial object under the hand-craft aspect.
Which forms of organization does this creative re-conquest of industrial objects take?

Ernesto Oroza I think the fact of reconsidering the industrial product from a hand-craft perspective encourages shrewd practices in contrast with the artificial voracity and activates more human temporary relations, like the repair, can authorize questions about the obtuse nature of the contemporaneous industrial object. When you open an object to fix it, there is a crack in the authority system which is set up. We see the internal organs of an authoritarian logic that imposes itself not only through a product but also through a system sequence : the objects integrate authoritarian families, share an infinite succession of reinforced generations. And this domination even precedes the arrival of the object at home; indeed its first domination takes place in the mass media. That’s why I used, in the ‹Rikimbili. Une étude sur la désobéissance technologique en quelques formes de réinvention› book, the image of Fidel Castro on the national television selling to Cubans a Chinese product used to boil water. The image couldn’t be much redundant and excessive in terms of imposition. When I talk about authority, I want to link it with all the logics these products induct, starting with the imposition of their scheduled life cycle.
Concerning your question about the forms of organization that qualify and diversify the hand-craft revision of the industrial in Cuba, I would comment one of them, which is fundamental to me: the accumulation. It seems to be a passive act, not creative, but it is literally the organizational starting point of the phenomenon. I grew up in a family where we kept everything and everything seems to have a potential. Each object accumulated by my mother can perfectly be useful in a situation of future shortage. The accumulation is in fact an emergency exit from an inopportune crisis, but it becomes a habit, because of distrust. The accumulation is regularly the first gesture in the production process and it has an absolute manual nature. That is to say that from the accumulation yet, you begin from a hand-craft point of view to be disrespectful to the life cycle integrated in the western industrial object. You infinitely postpone the moment of its waste by separating it from its assigned route. I think that the fact of accumulating things inserts an alteration, a notion of time, in the Cuban vernacular practices and this new own time organize them, give them the form of a parallel and productive phenomenon. I also said that the fact of accumulating is not only the suspicious fact of piling up objects. Well, when you do that you accumulate ideas of use, constructive solutions, technical systems and archetypes in general that can flourish when the situation gets worse.

Illustrations from: Con nuestros propios esfuerzos. Editorial Verde Olivo, 1992

BM I have the sensation that an important concept runs through your work, the material-object notion. Can you develop this idea, please?

EO I’ ve been writing recently on the issue related the re-use of generic objects as buckets or milk crates in precarious contexts like in Little Haiti, in Miami. Even if the situations are different, Cuba is characterized by a profound shortage and the US by an excess of products. In each case, there are social groups living in bad conditions. I met in each territory similar patterns of behaviour. It seems that people in these circumstances generally perceive their material universe in a discriminative way. They are just interested in the physical qualities of the objects that surround them. It’ s a diary process, an appropriate activity. When we look at the object from the exterior, we can understand it as the potential and real re-conversion in raw material of all the elements that integrate the environment of the individual. This process begins by erasing the objects’ and parts’ meanings present in our culture. That is to say that an individual recognizes in a bucket a kind of cultural profundity. But, when he is in a situation of need, he will just perceive it like an abstract compilation of materials with forms, edges, weight, structures. We can make a very familiar parallel with the relation of use we have with the natural world. It is normal to take a stone to hold a door or a branch to reach a fruit. The rhetorical or historical value of the stone won’ t be important when you need to let the door open, only its weight. A bucket full of water can only be used to block a door. The relation we maintain with things in both universes (natural and generic) comes from a unique condition: the two objects, the branch and the milk crate, suffer from identity. They seem to be foreign to the system of sense production, foreign to the culture. A plastic box to distribute milk is an abstract and autistic object, dumped through a circle of very specific requirements and that’ s why an object is accessible thanks to its excessive production. I wonder if the description fits with the branch or the stones’ one. For sure, the box has a social function, but its conception has been so much optimized that the human aspect has just become a value, a dimensional data within the plastic surface of the object, as it is for the weight of a litre of milk or the storage capacity of the truck that supplies it. The milk crate is a field sown with physical qualities, potentialities that will become more visible as far as we will have more needs, and it is also a field empty of sense. Its figure is so quiet in terms of image that its indifference and the indifference of the system producing it overwhelm us. Everyday the box travels full and comes back empty. It takes parts in a loop that could remain active for the eternity. If a box goes out the loop, lost or damaged, another one will replace it. If the world suddenly halts, the circle made by the boxes of milk in the city would continue to flow. We would be frightened by its social indifference, its pensiveness, the silence its centripetal move produces. But, around this circle or in a tangential scheme, there are circles of human activities eroding the perfection of the rational system where the milk crate subsists, splintering. The surrounding zones of the markets where milk is distributed are full of milk crates used like urban seats or used for other activities like car washing or water selling. In order to explain you how this occurs in Havana, we can use the example of the fan repaired thanks to a telephone. A quick glance to the object will carry us away from the art field of senses, from the readymade and from the index of associative resources of the Dada where the humour articulated with the image takes our look and our understandings. Nevertheless, for the repairman, the telephone is the unique form, similar to the original prismatic base, he could access to. When the telephone broke, he didn’ t throw it, the necessity made him suspicious. This telephone had been made in the ex-German Democratic Republic as it seems it stayed ten years under the bed or in a wardrobe. When the body of the fan broke, perhaps because of a fall, the family should be worried. A temperature of forty five degrees centigrade is a very difficult situation, the impossibility of replacing the object, because of the excessive disparity of wage, closes the debate. He has to assume the repair ; the accumulation he continued for years has a parallel existence in his memory. He remembers the old telephone. He only takes into account the physical attributes of the object. The angles and the internal plastic nerves that shape this prism with rectangular base assure the stability of the fan. The symbolic association that could appear after the repair are invisible for him. The pragmatism makes the reconstructed body of the object avoid any kind of symbolic construction intent. In Cuba, the process looks more severe as it begins with the flattening of the object’ s identity. In the US, the generic object seems to hide its identity, it yet comes flattened. From this, for the people of the Havana and from Little Haiti, a new field to pick physical virtues is open. Finally, I recently begin to associate this phenomenon to the ideas of Oswald de Andrade, specifically to his Cannibalistic Manifest (one thousand, nine hundred twenty eight). Helio Oiticica uses it to elaborate the “Super-cannibalism” concept considering an “immediate reduction of all the influences exterior to the national model”. By focusing the process on the productive universe and on the Cuban material culture, I can’t stop seeing it, literally like a super chewing, a super riding. It’s a violent action, in cultural terms, against the colonial material universe that surrounds us and which seems to be unable to solve the people life. But it is, over all, a foundation gesture to implement practices of disobedience from which it is impossible to evacuate ideological components around a culture of resistance.

Illustrations from: Con nuestros propios esfuerzos. Editorial Verde Olivo, 1992

BM In this context, you study the way Cubans have been able to re-appropriate the means of production and to develop what you call “the vernacular industrial production”. What is this?

EO I consider it like an appropriation of the productive management, but not of the productive system. The State means have been idle for a long time. The industry paralyzed. There was no raw material and the government had lost its markets.
The Cubans created a parallel productive space, constructed machines in their houses, workshops, tools. In some cases, they parasitized the State industry where they were working; creating productions on the sly, with illegal timetables, but it is not the most usual method. The lamp of extracted acrylic we showed in the book ‹Objets réinventés› connects the two variants: the appropriation of State productive means and the creation of parallel means of production.
It was discovered by some workers during a power cut in the nineties. When the blackout occurred, the Japanese machine used to produce rods for artificial insemination remained full of acrylic in its pipes of extrusion. So, it was necessary to drain it manually and in emergency. The acrylic expelled drew in the room elliptic lines and came tough, forming a complete figure and decorated by the gravity. With their gloves put on, they began to model in the air and to experiment forms that resulted ashtrays, centrepieces... I think that the workers had been waiting with joy and for a long time the forthcoming power cut. They had a legal protection to produce: they just had to save the machine from an obstruction and this liberation allowed they to produce something they could conserve, the expelled material was considered as a waste. One of them thought he could create such a machine at home; the device used to produce fritters was an analogous model. Since then, they did not need the State productive space anymore. They did not need either the Japanese machine that was ordered a power cut each three days. The access to the acrylic was the most complicated thing, but a black market appeared for this product. There were warehouses with immobile raw materials. The State had remained paralyzed, shocked by the crisis impact and he didn’ t react. The individuals found very quickly the responsibility in them for the productive management. The implementation of a familial industry in the ninety’ s, still active, is bound to the production of plastic and aluminium objects. The scale of the productions was so big and visible that they needed a patronage, a legal source of income and support. It is not the same thing to sell illegally ten lamps of kerosene made with beer tins and to sell three thousand plastic glasses. Indeed what was called “the local industries” came on stage. It was a State institution that gave job opportunities to some craftsmen and workers. It was unifying small workshops spread all over the city a long time before the revolution: printers of Linotype, workshops of sewing, of cobblers, workshops to produce craftworks. When the crisis appeared, the local industry was the unique skilled model the State had to regulate the vernacular productive torrent. It was used as a mediator to access to the raw materials, to distribute goods and later as a controller of the tax paying, to keep an eye on the illegal practices and appropriate the inventiveness and the popular effort.
The workshops in houses turned into living systems in the centre of the city. They employed young people of the area. Sometimes you could see them enter stealthily behind a tree: it was the thin access to an improvised cellar where there were two or three machines of plastic injection. The mechanisms were incredible, they produced them by themselves. Also the moulds. The need for raw materials converts these places into very selective “black hollows”. All the plastic objects from the surroundings were absorbed by the mechanism, a kind of industrial cannibalism. Hordes of plastic prospectors were collecting containers from everywhere to feed the monster that was expelling little heads of Batman at the other side. Sometimes families were living with the machines inside the house, not in a patio or a cellar. A room during the day can transform itself into a plant to produce electric switches, pipes or hoses. Photos of children on the wall of the house and a small bedside table now used as a toolbox reappraised the past of the space. I can’ t stop using these examples to answer you. In the order of the definitions, I think that the words “domestic or familial industrial production”, allow determine a more complete form of production that holds an implicit increase of the series characteristic and of the volume of production, but that remains especially associated to the house and that mixes its activities with the domestic tasks of the family. Other vernacular and familiar features in these productions, responding to appropriation gestures, can be found in the elaboration of the designs and in the inspiration sources. In a certain way, the objects present in the house before the crisis supplied a guide to get some values by appropriating the form of a glass. They used its dimensions, decorations, ergonomic values. The family recycled the formal universe coming from the exchanges of Cuba with the communist Europe. It had a second life embodied in the multicolour plastic or aluminium.

Illustrations from: Con nuestros propios esfuerzos. Editorial Verde Olivo, 1992

BM In front of a perpetual emergency, these practices of reinvention extend themselves to all fields of the everyday life. You say that “the city takes place at the biological rhythm of the house”, a strong image you employ is the potential house. Would you please tell us more about this thin link between the Human and its constructed environment?

EO The crisis persistence and the hope loss in the socialist government productivity generated a mentality, a social being that I called, revisiting Le Corbusier: the Moral Modulor. I talk about an individual or a family pushed in some circumstances under the poverty line (below zero would say Glauber Rocha).They can proceed to a moral reinvention. Their actions will occur in a threshold or a moral frequency where you can’t see old historical and esthetical values, social status, urban standards and codes of citizen behavior in general. That is to say, all these conventions relative to an order now hostile and restrictive of the family survival will be questioned. The individual will register this freedom in his spaces and objects, next to the order of his foot; he will set up an unknown moral dimension. The house, and the city by extension, becomes a continuous diagram of the shrewd relations of the individual with his needs, the contextual limits and the available resources. I told in other occasions that the facades are like films displayed from the middle of the house to the exterior. They talk about the past and the recent life of the family. Indeed, they announce plans, threaten of invasions or inform on future metamorphosis and fusions: staircases which don’ t fit to any side, walls that figure expanding to all interstices, baths open to the public sight, terrace roofs invaded by materials and heterogeneous accumulations. The house like a finished entity doesn’t exist anymore. The house is like an organism that auto-constructs itself in time to the human rhythms living in it. What I call Potential House, or more recently Convergent House, is a way to live in the process (of living). I think there is no better diagram to explain the relations you ask me than the houses themselves, their surfaces, spaces and structures.

Stills from Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011

ART@WORK PRESENTS ENEMIGO PROVISIONAL
Exhibition of Works by Ernesto Oroza
On View July 9 - August 31, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 16, 2011


Enemigo Provisional. Video, 2:56 min, color. 2004 (still)
Untitled. (from archive Technological Disobedience). Video, 3:01min 2005 (still)

Provisional Enemy
Shooting galleries in Cuba are spaces traversed by a nihilistic ray. These are sectors of the city--and of the material culture of the island--in which destruction occurs at an accelerated pace. They are the dispersed centers from where the void radiates.
 6 years ago I made a video titled Provisional Enemy. During the first seconds of the video, one reads: “On Tuesday, 26th of February, 2004, the person in charge of a shooting gallery agreed to sell me his work resources: a wire full of hanging objects that have been shot by dozens of Cubans, each day, with a pellet gun.”
A version of this video, photos from the archive "Enemigo Provisional", and videos of Fidel Castro promoting household goods from Communist China in Cuban national television constitute the exhibition "Enemigo Provisional" at Artatwork.
Ernesto Oroza, 2011

Untitled. (from archive Enemigo Provisional). 2004, D-print, 5 x 7 inches.
Untitled. (from archive Enemigo Provisional). 2004, D-print, 8 x 10 inches.

Untitled. (from archive Enemigo Provisional). 2004, D-print, 8.5 x 11 inches.
Untitled. (from archive Enemigo Provisional). 2004, D-print, 8.5 x 11 inches.

Gean Moreno / Ernesto Oroza, Untitled (Tile System), 2011, Hand-made, hydraulic cement tiles. 12 x 12 inches each tile

Curated by Nicholas Frank
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts
Curator's Statement
Download Tabloid (special issue) printed for the exhibition.

Ernesto Oroza’s “Architecture of Necessity” chronicles the inventive solutions that arise under conditions of severe economic limitations, such as those in his native Havana. The island nation of Cuba has been embargoed and isolated for decades and restricted by an authoritarian government, and deprivation is the norm. Though private production is illegal under the current system, people invent the things they need, and make changes to their built environment as necessary.
Oroza’s work (in essays, photographs, collected and reconstructed objects) documents the range of inventive solutions borne out of these conditions, while charting a moral course for social discourse and development.
The exhibition at Inova will feature a combination of interior design and architectural elements, along with documentary photographs of architectural modifications in Havana, and video detailing various household inventions. Inova will publish an edition of Oroza’s Tabloids, an ongoing project that conveys ideas and visual information in an inexpensive and widely distributable format. The Inova tabloid will act as the exhibition publication for the concurrent shows (Matthew Girson and Jeanne Dunning), and contain information specific to the Milwaukee community. We are grateful for the support of the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts and Aprenda Invertir (Miami).
This is Oroza’s first exhibition in the Midwest.

"The need for raw materials converts these places into very selective “black hollows”. All the plastic objects from the surroundings were absorbed by the mechanism, a kind of industrial cannibalism. Hordes of plastic prospectors were collecting containers from everywhere to feed the monster that was expelling little heads of Batman at the other side. Sometimes families were living with the machines inside the house, not in a patio or a cellar. A room during the day can transform itself into a plant to produce electric switches, pipes or hoses. Photos of children on the wall of the house and a small bedside table now used as a toolbox reappraised the past of the space."
From: Menu, Baptiste. Réactions en chaine Interview with Ernesto Oroza. Azimuts 35, Cite du design, 2010.

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{besps_c}0|F orozainova.jpg|Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011|Video installation, details. Marble plastic surface from plastic cups, jewels, toys made by families at home, using reinvented injection machines. Row material: scavenged plastic around the city: discarded auto pieces, stolen trash urban cans, plastic bottles.{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|G orozainova.jpg|Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011|Video installation, details. Marble plastic surface from plastic cups, jewels, toys made by families at home, using reinvented injection machines. Row material: scavenged plastic around the city: discarded auto pieces, stolen trash urban cans, plastic bottles.{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|H orozainova.jpg|Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011|Video installation, details. Marble plastic surface from plastic cups, jewels, toys made by families at home, using reinvented injection machines. Row material: scavenged plastic around the city: discarded auto pieces, stolen trash urban cans, plastic bottles.{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|H1 orozainova.jpg|Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011|Video installation, details. Marble plastic surface from plastic cups, jewels, toys made by families at home, using reinvented injection machines. Row material: scavenged plastic around the city: discarded auto pieces, stolen trash urban cans, plastic bottles.{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|H2 orozainova.jpg|Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011|Video installation, details. Marble plastic surface from plastic cups, jewels, toys made by families at home, using reinvented injection machines. Row material: scavenged plastic around the city: discarded auto pieces, stolen trash urban cans, plastic bottles.{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|H3 orozainova.jpg|Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011|Video installation, details. Marble plastic surface from plastic cups, jewels, toys made by families at home, using reinvented injection machines. Row material: scavenged plastic around the city: discarded auto pieces, stolen trash urban cans, plastic bottles.{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|I orozainova.jpg|Architecture of Necessity|General view{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|J orozainova.jpg|Architecture of Necessity|General view{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|K orozainova.jpg|Moral Modulor 1997-2008|{/besps_c}
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{besps_c}0|O orozainova.jpg|Fence|newspaper, cut{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|P orozainova.jpg|Moral Modulor's Drawings Project "When anthropometric dimensions become a metaphor for moral dimensions",|newspaper, cut{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|Pa orozainova.jpg|Moral Modulor's Drawings Project "When anthropometric dimensions become a metaphor for moral dimensions"| Collage, {/besps_c}
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{besps_c}0|S orozainova.jpg|Technological Disobedience, Little Havana Lamp shade, 2009|Clear silicone{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|Sa orozainova.jpg|Technological Disobedience, Little Haiti Lamp shade, 2007|Scotch tape{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|T orozainova.jpg|Tabloid (special edition), 2011; Paperweights, 2007|newspapers, cast cement{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|U orozainova.jpg|Booklet "Disobedience", 2010; Paperweights, 2007|newspapers, cast cement{/besps_c}
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{besps_c}0|X orozainova.jpg|Tabloid installation (special edition), 2011|pattern collected by Gean Moreno Little Haiti{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|Y orozainova.jpg|Tabloid installation (special edition), 2011|pattern collected by Ernesto Oroza (Havana 1997-present){/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|Z orozainova.jpg|Video proposal "Redrawing INOVA", 2011|Video, color{/besps_c}

- 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

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

selection & patterns
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{besps_c}0|Castor Bean (Ricinus communis).jpg|Castor Bean (Ricinus communis)|{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|Climbing Fern (Lygodium japonicum).jpg|Climbing Fern (Lygodium japonicum){/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|Day Blooming Jasmine (Cestrum diurnum).jpg|Day Blooming Jasmine (Cestrum diurnum){/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|Melaleuca quinquenervia.jpg|Melaleuca quinquenervia{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|Napier Grass (Pennisetum purpureum).jpg|Napier Grass (Pennisetum purpureum){/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|Puncture Vine (Tribulus cistoides).jpg|Puncture Vine (Tribulus cistoides){/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|Seaside Mahoe (Thespesia populnead).jpg|Seaside Mahoe (Thespesia populnead){/besps_c}

Light a fire with your house. Redrawing LegalArt's building. Electrical system, pencil, plastic sandal, text on wall, action. 2011 (Left).
Moral Modulor's Drawings Project "When anthropometric dimensions become a metaphor for moral dimensions", newspaper, cut 2011 (center)
Potential House. From Architecture of Necessity, 2008 (right).

"Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds" LegalArt, Miami. Curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud. Press release
"Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds" revisits the liberated attitude towards the creative process that defines the Fluxus movement. This project coincides with significant exhibitions happening at MOMA, NY; the Grey Art Gallery; NYU and at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, in collaboration with Performa 2011. This leads us to reflect on the similar attitudes between Fluxus actionists and a younger generation of artists as well as the socio-economic context in which these responses arise.

The title of this exhibition makes reference to a piece by composer John Cage, a notable influence on the Fluxus work of Lithuanian-born artist George Maciunas. Maciunas (1931-1978) organized the first Fluxus event in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York City and the first Fluxus festivals in Europe. The Fluxus art movement in the 1960's and 1970's was characterized by a strongly Dadaist attitude, promoting artistic experimentation mixed with social and political activism. Often celebrated anarchistic change, Fluxus members avoided any limiting art theories and spurned pure aesthetic objectives. Their activities resulted in events or situations often called Aktions (works challenging the definition of art) and included performances, guerilla or street theater and concerts of electronic music, many of them similar to what in America were known as Happenings.

In the spirit of the Fluxus tradition, Omar Lopez-Chahoud has invited local and international artists, collaboratives, situationists, and curators to present projects in the form of publications, events, discussions, performances, situations, and other actions. These groups and individuals will activate the space in a way similar to the Happenings of the Fluxus Movement, inspired by an anti-art and anti-consumer enthusiasm. Participants in this exhibition include: Augurari Editions, Rodolfo Andaur, Hackworth Ashley, Spring Break, Monserrat Rojas Corradi, Cat Dove, Viking Funeral, Andrea Galvani,  Jay Hines, Scott Hug, Karlo Ibarra, Carlos Irijalba, Brookhart Jonquil, Jason Keeling, Kristin Korolowicz, Liz Magic Laser, Nicolas Lobo,  Gean Moreno, Richard Mosse, Ernesto Oroza, Gaston Persico, Manny Prieres, Print and Paste Collective (FAU), Megan Riley, Tom Scicluna, Joaquin Segura, SOMA, Natika Soward, Lara Stein Pardo, Suzanne Stroebe, Third Streaming/Yona Baker, Cecilia Szalkowicz, TM Sisters, Pinar Yolacan and others.

Omar Lopez-Chahoud has made use of his LegalArt residency as a lab for ideas, strategies and questions that organically shape the content of this exhibition. This project, like Cage's composition, creates a potential space for creative energy and responses, facilitating a fertile dialog with the community outside of the traditional gallery venue. Publications produced by artists, curators, and art organizations will be available for research on the second floor of LegalArt. The exhibition continues on the fourth floor with multimedia installations and performances.

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

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

Rethinking home from a pragmatic and criminal perspective. I am using the electrical system to "redrawing" the house. The action is connected with thousands of gestures individules that reimagine the urban infrastructures.

(detail) Light a fire with your house. Redrawing LegalArt's building. Electrical system, pencil, plastic sandal, text on wall, action. 2011

Potential House. From Architecture of Necessity, 2008 (right).

Moral Modulor's Drawings Project "When anthropometric dimensions become a metaphor for moral dimensions", newspaper, cut, 2011

Tabloids, 2008-2011 www.thetabloid.org

Light a fire with your house (redrawing the city), 2011
Electrical system, pencil, plastic sandal, text on wall, action.

Archetype: the original pattern or model from which all things of the same kind are copied or on which they are based.

As Ernesto Oroza began his work on Archetype Vizcaya, we invited him to look closely at the estate. For several months, he examined the patterns of materials and the movements of crowds and individuals, including party planners and curators; he opened every closet and catalogued visible and invisible surfaces; he explored the archives and original designs for the property; he moved across the line that separates the public from what is behind the stanchions and the plexiglass; and he studied Vizcaya’s presence on the Web.

For several years, Oroza has been interested in utilitarian objects and vernacular practices of appropriation, in which things are taken from their original context and given new purpose and meaning. As an extravagant Italianate vacation home designed for millionaire James Deering by artist and interior decorator Paul Chalfin, Vizcaya would not appear at first sight to be remotely touched by issues of necessity or by a vernacular approach to architecture and design. In fact, we invited Oroza because we were confident that his work in entirely different contexts would enable him to see Vizcaya with fresh eyes, helping us to understand how the estate is currently “used” by its visitors and to envision alternate ways of “using” it.

Oroza developed tools that engage us in looking at this National Historic Landmark with an active, playful and ironic perspective. At the same time, in exploring the dynamics of cultural appropriation, Oroza raises issues at the core of Vizcaya’s history and cultural significance. So too does he present Vizcaya as an ongoing layering of appropriations, histories and meanings, still vibrant and more unpredictable than ever.

A key component of Oroza’s project is a printed “map” of the Main House. This map is far from a literal floor plan, but rather an abstract guide that invites visitors to discover objects and ideas generally unseen or overlooked. The extravagant floors assembled by Chalfin serve as the organizing principle. On one part of the map, the floors are catalogued as a means to identify the different spaces at Vizcaya; and the floors are associated by numbers to images of objects in the rooms that they adorn. The map directs us to look at the surfaces beneath our feet and, in doing so, breaks our normative viewing habits and frees us to participate in an intensive treasure hunt for curious artifacts. Oroza’s map is an object in its own right that can be taken home and enjoyed as a piece of art or wallpaper, or in any way one wishes.

Visitors using the map to explore Vizcaya will find traces of Oroza’s intervention and interpretation in unexpected places around the house. On the plexiglass, for example, Oroza has inserted silhouettes of the invasive plants that endanger Miami’s local vegetation. By introducing “alien” things into the fabric of Vizcaya, Oroza challenges us to question what is original or authentic on an estate in which the buildings, landscape, furniture and art objects were all imported or invented.

Ernesto Oroza also went outside of the estate’s walls to understand Vizcaya, scouring the Web for information. From this research, he assembled the third component of his project, a catalogue of amateur videos of quinceañeras, weddings and other parties at the estate. To immerse oneself in this kaleidoscope of moving images is perhaps the best, and certainly the most entertaining, way to understand how Vizcaya is “used” by its visitors.

With Archetype Vizcaya, Oroza explores the border between the institution and its appropriation by the public.
He creates new tools to experience Vizcaya’s spaces and to discover the unseen. Oroza causes us to contemplate what is “native” and what is “alien” in a museum context or in a social environment. And, he asks us to consider the relevance of a historic house filled with Italian decorative arts in modern Miami. But, most important, he shows us that if Deering and Chalfin could appropriate and reinvent Italian decorative arts and design almost one hundred years ago, we should feel free to appropriate and reinvent their work today.

Over the last few months, we engaged in ongoing conversation with Ernesto Oroza about Vizcaya and its multiple histories. The inside of this brochure includes excerpts of this conversation, which was central to the development of his project.

Flaminia Gennari-Santori, Deputy Director for Collections and Curatorial Affairs

Courtesy, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
© Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, Miami, Florida. All rights reserved.

A conversation between Ernesto Oroza and Flaminia Gennari-Santori, Vizcaya’s Deputy Director for Collections and Curatorial Affairs.

EO: Do you think Paul Chalfin applied architectural historicism at Vizcaya because it was a culturally accepted “shortcut” or for other reasons?

FGS: Vizcaya is a product of its time, and architectural historicism is a crucial component of its aesthetic. But, at Vizcaya, historicism was used as the language for the fictional narrative of a country house that had been occupied for centuries and had graciously accommodated changes in taste and style. In fact, it was built over the span of just a few years as the theatrical set for the cultural projections of its owner, James Deering, and even more, of its designer, Paul Chalfin. One could look at the entire estate as the ideal portrait of a worldy, sophisticated gentleman, with the taste of a connoisseur and the means to surround himself with the ultimate technology. And yet, here and there, like in the sets of a period film, one finds the props, the joints of old and new, of “authentic” and “imitated.” Still, I believe that Chalfin had a further ambition: to reproduce the layering of styles and historical periods that he had learned to appreciate in Italy. The result was, of course, pure American eclecticism.

EO: What do you think are some of the most interesting objects for someone trying to understand Vizcaya?

FGS: One of them is certainly the statue of Mezzogiorno (“Midday”), which greets visitors on the driveway when they enter the property. This idealized representation of a Caribbean native —dressed as a classical soldier and symbolizing the passage of time—originally adorned a garden in the Veneto. At Vizcaya, it was placed in its preeminent position as an evocation of a mythical Caribbean and, thus, for me, Mezzogiorno synthesizes Vizcaya’s multiple layers: 18th-century Venice and the early 20th-century culture of appropriation and reinvention that created the estate. In the house, one of my favorite objects is the system of shelves on the east wall of the Living Room. It was created in central Italy in the mid 16th-century as a church screen. Paul Chalfin cut it into pieces, added some surreal neoclassical urns and transformed it into a display case for “collectibles,”an indispensable element in the house of a gentleman. Yet, the “collectibles” are the least interesting things: partly hidden by the structure, one can find beautiful, tragic wood carvings of men fighting with demons, of medallions with monks’ profiles, of human figures with clawed hands. A house designed for relaxing and entertaining hides these daunting and moving figures.

EO: I find the plexiglass panels in the house quite interesting, because I see them as a vernacular intrusion into the history of Vizcaya. I think that the plexiglass can be interpreted as the validation of certain surfaces, a curatorial decision imposed by preservation specialists to protect things of historic value from museum visitors. How do you see them?

FGS: I think that the placement of the plexiglass at Vizcaya is one of the most curious sub-narratives of the house. Why we find a panel in front of a plain wall, and not protecting the 18thcentury lacquer door next to it, is a m ystery that entirely defies me. The plexiglass is another layer in Vizcaya’s history that you are bringing to our attention by including it in your project. Like the canopy, the plexiglass marks the conversion from private home to public museum, a transition that understandably generated anxieties of control and institutional identity.

EO: The eccentric character of a Baroque retreat on Biscayne Bay must have seemed far more powerful without the Courtyard glass canopy, when the house was exposed to natural forces such as wind, rain, hurricanes, saltwater and mosquitos. Do you think that the museum’s collection and activities could be sustained if the canopy were removed?

FGS: The canopy is the most aesthetically intrusive consequence of the transformation of Vizcaya into a public museum. The Main House was conceived as a pavilion immersed in nature, where the sky and the sea could be seen from every room. The most interesting challenge of a house museum is that it forces you to balance on the thin and slippery ridge between the public and private realms. The canopy exemplifies this challenge. We are about to commission a new one and our goal is to make it as light and invisible as possible, while protecting the collection and keeping the heart of Vizcaya comfortable for the public even during the summer. I agree with you that the glass canopy compromises Vizcaya’s magic, yet in order to stay alive, places need to subtly adapt to time.

FGS: And now I’d like to ask you a question. With Archetype Vizcaya, you unveil a new geography of the place, which reflects both your own approach as an artist and designer and the very thorough research you conducted on the estate and its history. How did your desire to “re-map” what is already historic come about, and what do you hope visitors will take away from the tools you have provided?

EO: My answer would explain not only this project, but my practice in general. In my work, I have developed an analytical structure, a diagram that is almost immutable, with spaces or variables that are filled in by the context I study. It’s a system of ideas and convictions structured by my inquiries into material culture, need, design, languages, and radical and experimental architecture. Yet, the content that fills the equation—the context—ends up affecting the work. This is what happened with Archetype Vizcaya: my model came face-to-face with the structure and the interrelationships of Paul Chalfin’s interior design. I found some recurrent behaviors here and thought that it might be important to reiterate them. The patterns of appropriation and permutation have been so present at Vizcaya from its very origin, that I believe they’re inevitable. Vizcaya has been dissolving into Miami since its construction, due to the climate, changes in function and its relationship to the community. To me, it is interesting to sit back and watch this process. It’s like adding pigment to a river and watching it dissolve into the sea. The map, the provisional gallery on the plexiglass and the video archive are all moving in this direction, and are abstract tools that can be employed anywhere; but, at Vizcaya, they can provoke very specific results.

"Marble is a material that results from the encounter of powerful natural forces; colored veins are the result of a fluid of magma that penetrates the limestone rock. To mineralogists, these shapes that we consider beautiful are, in fact, impurities that invaded the rock. Any piece of marble in Vizcaya may be considered the diagram of a similar process of contamination that has occurred during the life of the building.
Similarly, for almost a century, Vizcaya has been exposed to the pressures of individual, social, economic and institutional forces, in an ongoing process of contamination. One of the most powerful and pervasive of these forces was Paul Chalfin (1873-1959), the artistic director who created Vizcaya’s fantastic interiors twisting and playing with the canon of European decoration. Other major transformations occurred after 1953, when Vizcaya became a museum. For example, to protect artifacts from visitors panels of plexiglass were placed over many surfaces. It was as if a transparent plastic vein had invaded the stone body of the building. Vizcaya itself can be seen as an intrusion into the Miami tropical landscape of 100 years ago."
Ernesto Oroza, 2011

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{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya b.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|The Video Archive (espacioprovisional.info/vizcaya): This archive is a compilation of videos filmed by visitors in the exteriors of Vizcaya and posted on YouTube. They include quinceañeras, weddings, tourists, parties and concerts.{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya c.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|Map, installation{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya c1.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|The Video Archive (espacioprovisional.info/vizcaya): This archive is a compilation of videos filmed by visitors in the exteriors of Vizcaya and posted on YouTube. They include quinceañeras, weddings, tourists, parties and concerts.{/besps_c}
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{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya e.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|"Espacio Provisional/ Provisional Space: The plexiglass panels that cover and preserve surfaces throughout Vizcaya constitute a gallery I call Espacio Provisional. To show the “architecture” of Espacio Provisional, I use the plexiglass as an exhibition space. On several of them, I have placed a grouping of vinyl silhouettes that represent invasive plants prohibited in Miami-Dade County."{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya f.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|"Espacio Provisional/ Provisional Space: The plexiglass panels that cover and preserve surfaces throughout Vizcaya constitute a gallery I call Espacio Provisional. To show the “architecture” of Espacio Provisional, I use the plexiglass as an exhibition space. On several of them, I have placed a grouping of vinyl silhouettes that represent invasive plants prohibited in Miami-Dade County."{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya g.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|"Espacio Provisional/ Provisional Space: The plexiglass panels that cover and preserve surfaces throughout Vizcaya constitute a gallery I call Espacio Provisional. To show the “architecture” of Espacio Provisional, I use the plexiglass as an exhibition space. On several of them, I have placed a grouping of vinyl silhouettes that represent invasive plants prohibited in Miami-Dade County."{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya h.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|"Espacio Provisional/ Provisional Space: The plexiglass panels that cover and preserve surfaces throughout Vizcaya constitute a gallery I call Espacio Provisional. To show the “architecture” of Espacio Provisional, I use the plexiglass as an exhibition space. On several of them, I have placed a grouping of vinyl silhouettes that represent invasive plants prohibited in Miami-Dade County."{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya h1.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|"Espacio Provisional/ Provisional Space: The plexiglass panels that cover and preserve surfaces throughout Vizcaya constitute a gallery I call Espacio Provisional. To show the “architecture” of Espacio Provisional, I use the plexiglass as an exhibition space. On several of them, I have placed a grouping of vinyl silhouettes that represent invasive plants prohibited in Miami-Dade County."{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya i.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|"Espacio Provisional/ Provisional Space: The plexiglass panels that cover and preserve surfaces throughout Vizcaya constitute a gallery I call Espacio Provisional. To show the “architecture” of Espacio Provisional, I use the plexiglass as an exhibition space. On several of them, I have placed a grouping of vinyl silhouettes that represent invasive plants prohibited in Miami-Dade County."{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya j.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|"Espacio Provisional/ Provisional Space: The plexiglass panels that cover and preserve surfaces throughout Vizcaya constitute a gallery I call Espacio Provisional. To show the “architecture” of Espacio Provisional, I use the plexiglass as an exhibition space. On several of them, I have placed a grouping of vinyl silhouettes that represent invasive plants prohibited in Miami-Dade County."{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya k.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|"Espacio Provisional/ Provisional Space: The plexiglass panels that cover and preserve surfaces throughout Vizcaya constitute a gallery I call Espacio Provisional. To show the “architecture” of Espacio Provisional, I use the plexiglass as an exhibition space. On several of them, I have placed a grouping of vinyl silhouettes that represent invasive plants prohibited in Miami-Dade County{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya l.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|"Espacio Provisional/ Provisional Space: The plexiglass panels that cover and preserve surfaces throughout Vizcaya constitute a gallery I call Espacio Provisional. To show the “architecture” of Espacio Provisional, I use the plexiglass as an exhibition space. On several of them, I have placed a grouping of vinyl silhouettes that represent invasive plants prohibited in Miami-Dade County."{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya m.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|"Espacio Provisional/ Provisional Space: The plexiglass panels that cover and preserve surfaces throughout Vizcaya constitute a gallery I call Espacio Provisional. To show the “architecture” of Espacio Provisional, I use the plexiglass as an exhibition space. On several of them, I have placed a grouping of vinyl silhouettes that represent invasive plants prohibited in Miami-Dade County."{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya n.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|"Espacio Provisional/ Provisional Space: The plexiglass panels that cover and preserve surfaces throughout Vizcaya constitute a gallery I call Espacio Provisional. To show the “architecture” of Espacio Provisional, I use the plexiglass as an exhibition space. On several of them, I have placed a grouping of vinyl silhouettes that represent invasive plants prohibited in Miami-Dade County."{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|oroza vizcaya o.jpg|Archetype Vizcaya, 2011|Installation view{/besps_c}

ARCHETYPE VIZCAYA 12/12/2009

I want to do a research on the material culture that has given form and meaning to the Vizcaya, from its origins as a home, up to present as a museum.

I recognize that the Vizcaya was an accomplishment desire of James Deering to found a village in a virgin natural context, inspired by archetypes of comfort and social exchange of different places and times. I consider that the Architectural and Interior Design projects that was conceived and directed by Paul Chalfin in this place, has been the vehicle for this foundation process. In this way, the topics that are more interest to me of the historical material of the history of Vizcaya are: the very idea of the foundation itself, the models (archetypes) and the means (Interior Design and Architecture) by which this foundation process was consolidated.

I have found in the Archetype concept, a very important parallel between the history of the Vizcaya and the "objects of necessity" in which I’ve always been interested since I lived in Cuba. In my book, Reinvented Objects, I dedicated a chapter to the idea of Archetype and its function in the works of reconstruction the habitat, which during the economic crisis affected the island for several decades. I consider that the Vizcaya and the Cuba of the 90’, although characterized by opposed material cultures, they share in the archetype a possibility to restart, a hope.

With my research I intend to “re-found” the Vizcaya, virtually speaking. For this, I will use the Interior Design as a theoretical tool to analyze and to project new ways to associate and interpret the objects and spaces of the museum. I’m specifically interested in the capacity of the Interior Design and the Architecture to build meanings and knowledge by means of the space and the relationship with the human being that inhabits it.

My investigation will result in three materials: a Video Library, a Book, and a Map.

VIDEO LIBRARY: - I want to collect, to classify and to return the Vizcaya, systematically, those digital videos filmed during visits, family celebrations (weddings, birthday, quinceaneras) and social events happened in the spaces of the museum. The videos that interest me are those that have been up loaded to Youtube during the last years. In these videos, we can observe new uses of the Vizcaya and a continuous re-interpretation of the place by the community. Each architectural object, each area of the garden and of the building, each perspective is objects of a process of family appropriation that reinvent the place inserting it in a new narrative. The videos accumulated in Youtube have been processed with effects, animations, re-alignments, texts and sound bands that complete this practice of absorption or digestion of the Vizcaya for the family and collective imaginary. With this re-collection I seek to connect the physical universe of the Vizcaya with the digital sphere of Youtube and with the private environment of the family memoirs. I pretend to design a program of video projections at the garden of the museum.

BOOK: - The book will contain the texts, diagrams, collages, pictures of my projects of re-interpretation of this village. It will have from 60 to 120 pages and an approximate format of 8"x 10."

MAP: - The map will be printed, with a minimum format of 22"x17", will be the means to link this project directly with the visitors of the museum. One side of the map will contain "guides" or suggestions on how to “walk" and "to be" in the Vizcaya. On the reverse, the map will contain a scanned graphic pattern that will document some important element of the place. The pattern will have the potentiality, when multiplying, of producing ornamental surfaces as wallpapers, carpets etc. With this map-pattern I will be adding a new object to the material history of the museum and at the same time enabling a new relationship of the Vizcaya with the metropolis that embraces it. People with these maps will be carrying, potentiality a practical model of expansion of the Vizcaya toward Miami. In the future, the pattern will be integrated into the domestic environment of the city, everything will be covered by these decorative surfaces and the dreams of Deering and Chalfin will flood the city.

Courtesy, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
© Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, Miami, Florida. All rights reserved.

Prohibited Plant Species List

The following is a list of plant species prohibited in Miami-Dade County.

• Air Potato (Dioscorea bulbifera)
• Australian Pine (Casurina equisetifolia)
• Banyan Fig (Ficus benghalensis)
• Bishopwood (Bischofia javanica)
• Brazilian Jasmine (Jasminum fluminense)
• Brazilian Pepper (Schinus terebinthifolius)
• Burma Reed (Cane Grass) - Neyaudia reynaudiana
• Carrotwood (Cupaniopsis anacardioides)
• Castor Bean (Ricinus communis)
• Catclaw Mimosa (Mimosa pigra)
• Climbing Fern (Lygodium japonicum, Lygodium microphyllum)
• Day Blooming Jasmine (Cestrum diurnum)
• Earleaf Acacia (Acacia auriculiformis)
• Gold Coast Jasmine (Jasminum dichotomum)
• Governor's Plum (Flacourtia indica)
• Indian Rosewood (Dalbergia sissoo)
• Lather Leaf (Colubrina asiatica)
• Lead Tree (Leucaena leucocephala, Leucaena glauca)
• Lofty Fig (Banyan Tree) - Ficus altissima
• Laurel Fig (Banyan Tree) - Ficus microcarpa, Ficus nitida, Ficus retusa
• Mahoe (Hibiscus tiliaceus)
• Melaleuca (Punk Tree) - Melaleuca quinquenervia, Melaleuca leucadendron
• Napier Grass (Pennisetum purpureum)
• Puncture Vine (Tribulus cistoides)
• Queensland Umbrella Tree (Schefflera actinophylla, Brassaia actinophylla)
• Red Sandalwood (Adenanthera pavonina)
• Seaside Mahoe (Thespesia populnead)
• Shoebutton Ardisia (Ardisia elliptica, Ardisia humilis)
• Tropical Soda Apple (Solanum viarum)
• Woman's Tongue (Albizia lebbeck)
• Woodrose (Merremia tuberosa)

Archetype Vizcaya Youtube Channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7-foq9n4s0&playnext=1&list=PL7945988DCDEADEB3

By Hardcore Art Contemporary Space (Albums)

Freddy (in collaboration with Gean Moreno)

Crystal Radio (Radio a Galena), 2011. Gean Moreno, Ernesto Oroza.
"Radio a galena" is an rudimentary crystal radio that function without a conventional power source. They are housed inside milk crate casings which are then stacked in towers. Early versions of the modern radio as we've come to know it, Crystal Radios convert electromagnetic radio waves into alternating electric currents.

Improvising Architectures Christy Gast, Adler Guerrier, Nicolas Lobo, Ernesto Oroza, Viking Funeral, Graham Hudson, Felipe Arturo, Heather Rowe and Carlos Sandoval de León

Curated by Gean Moreno
Project opening January 13th 2011

Improvising Architectures

Over the last decade there have a been a number of exhibitions dedicated to Miami artists. These have been excellent at presenting a generation of homegrown artists, and explaining its internal dynamics and its relationship to previous generations that migrated to, and continue to work in the city. What these exhibitions haven’t done as consistently is place the work of Miami artists alongside that of their international generational peers in a concrete way–that is, by literally presenting the work side-by-side, on equal footing.

It is only by doing this that we can begin to gauge how these artists fare in an international context. One the one hand, the similarities that Miami artist may share with their international counterparts will surface, disclosing how their work fits within international trends. On the other hand, their differences will also shine through to reveal what new positions they bring to an international dialogue. One of the goals of Improvising Architectures is to begin this process of presenting Miami artists within a larger context in a systematic way. It will showcase the work of five Miami artists–Christy Gast, Adler Guerrier, Nicolas Lobo, Ernesto Oroza and Viking Funeral–along side that of artists who live in London (Graham Hudson), Bogotá (Felipe Arturo), and New York (Heather Rowe and Carlos Sandoval de León).

Another goal of the exhibition is to take improvised architectural spaces as figures through which to think a world of globalized networks. What is the relationship between “nomadic” structures or improvised buildings and a world that is, at once, more connected and more disconnected, more prone to swift changes precisely because it is a world of expanding horizons? What happens when a sense of the precarious begins to be felt everywhere? Of course we need not think of all this so literally. What of discursive or mental architectures–ways of seeing the world–that need to be improvised to keep up with the velocities and changes that cut right through our everyday lives? The improvised dwelling site is a metaphor for ways of thinking that need to be light enough to change quickly as disruptions and alteration continue to reorganize the world for us. The sculptures and installations in this exhibition allude to the informal architectural structure as a double metaphor. On the one hand, as the trope for a type of building that recognizes the world as a series of forces that can change everything in an instant. And, on the other hand, as a metaphor for the kind of thinking that is necessary in a world that is increasingly characterized by erratic shifts, proliferating information, and expanding vistas.

-Gean Moreno

ENTER THE DRAGON Pop-up shop, Ernesto Oroza, 2010
Customized vinyl adhesives tiles, fluorescent lamps, prints.

ENTER THE DRAGON

Hay imágenes que tienen la capacidad de cambiar el sentido de una práctica. Una de ellas es No-Stop City, fue elaborada por Archizoom in 1969.

El grupo creó y divulgó decenas de dibujos, fotomontajes y fotografías de modelos que diagramaban este fatalismo urbano que es la ciudad genérica. Su propuesta interpretaba y anunciaba en los nuevos espacios de producción y consumo (fábricas, supermercados y grandes mall), un modelo real para urbanizaciones interiores totales, espacios fluidos con capacidad infraestructural para atender a todas las necesidades de los habitantes. Si bien la tesis de Archizoom iniciaba con un análisis crítico-realista al sistema capitalista y específicamente al estado de hyper consumismo, sus creaciones se enfocaron en mostrar paisajes premonitorios en los cuales quedaríamos habitando, obligatoriamente y quizás acosados por un espacio exterior árido y contaminado, reductos interiores ambientados y normalizados por una incipiente, en aquel entonces, burocracia global capitalista.

Entre 1970 y 1972 el colectivo da a conocer un conjunto de nuevas fotografías de maquetas realizadas al centro de una estructura prismática formada por cuatro espejos. Cada set acogía un mini universo modélico y lo expandía por medio de la percepción fotográfica hacia un sinnúmero de reflexiones. Una palma, unas columnas metálicas, una alfombra, una moto, una cocina, una casa de campaña, algunas rocas se usaron indistinta o conjuntamente para crear los paisajes interiores de No-Stop City. Los únicos límites visibles en la perspectiva se lograban con las representaciones de pisos alfombrados y pavimentados, falsos techos reticulados iluminados, paredes de panelería metálica o plástica modulares.

Un ambiente micro climatizado y alumbrado artificialmente es la condición perpetua de estos modelos que devoran nuestra mirada, repetición tras repetición, en una perspectiva sin fin. Aun aquellos que representan un paisaje exterior con zonas de césped, e incluso árboles y edificios, parecen producirse en un interior con luces y clima controlados hasta la infinitud. Y es que las distinciones efectivas entre áreas y funciones, entre exteriores e interiores, espacios de producción y consumo (y desecho), entre sitios de trabajo y descanso o recreación parecían colapsar una y otra vez en cada célula especular. Es posible que las funciones enmarcadas y la especialización de áreas hubieran producido interrupciones en la perspectiva deseada para esta metrópolis fluida. Al suprimirlas, apostando por un imperativo visual que favorecía la indiferenciación de zonas de uso, predijeron la condición invasiva, desparramada y ubicua (en términos funcionales, métricos y logísticos) de la materia genérica contemporánea.

Siempre he creído que la imagen de No-Stop City, como un modelo de expansión solo pudo ser imaginado sobre otra figura de invasión: la de la Roma imperial. Aunque la tipología fluida y la escala mega estructural de este proyecto urbano pudiera tener antecedentes formales en la New Babylon de Constant y comparte esos mismos rasgos con el Monumento Continuo de Superstudio, las urbes conectadas de Archigram y la ciudad espacial de Yona Friedman, entre otros proyectos de la época, se distingue de estos al colocar como energía generativa al capital, los modelos económicos transnacionales, el lenguaje convencional de lo genérico, las normas y su instrumentación.

Las maquetas y diagramas usados en prácticas proyectuales como la arquitectura, el diseño y el urbanismo se comportan como caballos de Troya. Son, frecuentemente, objetos de traición y decepción. Lo que parece ocurrir es que por mediación de su capacidad anunciadora estos modelos promueven también, sin que esto sea un propósito, las realidades de su propio tiempo. Es decir, albergan en su cuerpo de madera, cartón y plástico las realidades tecnológicas, ideológicas y económicas que el arquitecto radical está criticando y pretende superar. Estas realidades no solo se asientan en las materias del modelo sino que parasitan inequívocamente los vehículos para la trascendencia del mismo. Viajan en el tiempo, la realidad y su crítica, hasta derretirse en un solo cuerpo.

Cada hito intelectual está constreñido, atrapado en el lenguaje proyectual de su tiempo y en muchas de aquellas visionarias propuestas de los 70´ se transpira hoy la presencia de afectadas ideologías tecnológicas, las ineficiencias para trascender de las técnicas y formas de comunicación de su tiempo y esa incapacidad que tiene el imaginario tecnológico para adelantarse al futuro.

Un año atrás, mirando fotografías de los modelos de No-Stop City en el último libro publicado sobre el grupo, descubrí pequeños accidentes en los bordes de las maquetas, restos de pegamento, desniveles, polvo, manchas, fisuras. Creo que estas intrusiones no fueron producto del envejecimiento, pues las fotos debieron tomarse inmediatamente tras la fabricación de los modelos, sino que -formaron parte del proceso constructivo mismo. Noté después que estas minúsculas imperfecciones y las costras se multiplicaban también en los espejos creando un nuevo patrón de repeticiones que una vez visto no puede ser obviado.

En la nueva imagen (ya no puedo recuperar la anterior) cohabitan la palma (recurrente en los proyectos de Archizoom) con cúmulos de basura y arañazos. En la unión entre el falso techo y las columnas abunda la entidad amorfa, el resto de pegamento, que en el ámbito de la representación del modelo parece baba chorreada, una y otra vez hasta el colapso del horizonte, por algún -monstruo que habita el exterior de No-Stop City. Sobre la superficie pulida de columnas y volúmenes multi-funcionales de acabados genéricos (Formica, Abet Laminati) se deja ver una capa de polvo con una escala y cantidad tal que asusta: el polvo devino una inagotable escombrera. Los espejos devinieron un medio viral insuperable, un surtidor de eczemas, un sistema reproductivo artificial que nunca antes alojó mejor la metáfora de la metrópolis genética autogenerativa que Branzi, hasta hoy, propone.

Expandiéndose perennemente a lo largo de este paisaje urbanístico, las manchas y errores también han trascendido en el tiempo. Quizás en las maquetas, que hoy conservan colecciones como la del Centre Pompidou, se ha complicado el asunto de estas manchas. Quizás ya produjeron sus propios mohos y hongos, unos minúsculos ecosistemas. Puedo imaginar esas entropías intrusas consolidándose con un aburrimiento especular. Células voraces reproduciéndose, o batallando por sobrevivir como Bruce Lee en Enter the Dragon (1973), alimentándose de los ácidos y otras materias orgánicas de la cola, las tintas y el papel. Y cada célula feroz repitiéndose miles de veces más, de verdad y en los espejos. Habitando un modelo para hacerlo mas eficiente en su carácter pedagógico y representacional, afinando su premonición de la metrópolis no figurativa constituida y normada por las reglas métricas y morales que impone la sobrevivencia, por las convenciones sociales, por astucias tan inevitables que recurren hasta devenir patrones de comportamiento previsibles y por tanto débiles y necesariamente reemplazados por otras nuevas astucias.

Pero hay una condición de tiempo fundamental en estas maquetas y sus fotos. Cuando fueron tomadas las fotografías los elementos extraños ya habían invadido el espacio aséptico de la maqueta utópica y le acusaron una mayor dosis de realidad, de presente. Es decir, que los borrones, el polvo, las células muertas y los cabellos de Branzi, Corretti y Deganello, al traernos de vuelta el plano de realidad que ellos habitaron nos remiten igualmente al contexto cultural y social de su tiempo, a las ansiedades y energías que nutrieron a No-Stop City. Sin embargo la utopía inscrita en el manifiesto que se conoce, en las decenas de fotos de estas maquetas publicadas por tantos años, irradia una luz que ciega, hace invisible y pospone la realidad del modelo: el presente, que cohabita con la utopía. Es decir, la lucidez e imaginación del proyecto, la fe inyectada por Branzi y sus colegas en su programa y visión crítica de futuro esconde al observador la realidad de la maqueta, que es la suya. La utopía no deja ver la fatalidad de la materia que la forma: la vieja ideología se amarillea como el cartón. “La utopía no está en el fin, sino en lo real. No hay en ella motivación moral, sino un puro proceso de liberación inmediata. No hay en ella alegoría, sino un fenómeno natural…” nos recuerda Branzi¹

Morocco Slate, Senegal Burnt Almond y Regal Wood

Como el moho en los modelos de No-Stop City, en las ciudades contemporáneas recurren una y otra vez ciertas tácticas de parasitación e inserción en infraestructuras productivas y comerciales. El hecho no está lejos del centro crítico del proyecto de Archizoom, el cual enunciaba que “en un mundo sin calidad el individuo solo puede satisfacerse mediante su propio -esfuerzo y actividad creativa”.

Nunca antes, como en su estadio genérico, tuvo la cultura material tanta potencialidad para la injerencia, nunca antes pudo ser considerado un sistema tan abierto o de participación como puede ser apreciado ahora. Y es paradójico porque a la producción genérica y la súper normalización hay que reconocerle también una sórdida indiferencia hacia lo doméstico y por tanto al individuo y sus necesidades. La condición autista del universo natural en relación a las problemáticas humanas parece inherente también a lo genérico. Si el sistema se ha abierto no es por empatía social, todo lo contrario, es por indiferencia hacia lo humano, ya no hay interés en cerrarse, en sacar provecho del secreto técnico. Sin embargo el objeto industrial pre-genérico parece más dado a lo hermético, a esconder los principios patentados, a hacerse extraño, inaccesible (a cambio de esto aparece en el objeto un plano que se responsabiliza por la interface, una superficie amigable.)

Si un ventilador reparado sigue pareciéndonos una sorpresa folclórica es porque por mucho tiempo el sistema industrial capitalista se valió de cierta inviolabilidad del cuerpo del producto. Quizás se trata de algo tan básico como que al ocultar las vísceras del objeto se potencie el deseo de poseerlo. Quizás, también, al asegurar el perímetro cuantificable del objeto, al hacerlo una porción nombrable e indisoluble este se constituya una mercancía. Una entidad igualada a una cantidad especifica de valor monetario. El objeto industrial contemporáneo -y al diseño hay que reconocerle su participación activa en ese proceso- puede ser entendido, además, como una representación de cierto valor cambiario, como aquel trozo de metal usado como patrón de masa en las básculas tradicionales.

El universo genérico, sin embargo, parece favorecer más el fragmento y no al objeto, la nueva mercancía es semifinish, innombrable en la forma tradicional de silla, mesa, radio. Ahora un recubrimiento para pisos en vinyl adhesivo puede llamarse Morocco Slate, una tabla de bagazo con un acabado plástico puede ser encontrada en ferreterías, como Home Depot, bajo el nombre de Cancún. Muchos de los productos actuales no pueden ser nombrados en el término tradicional de objeto, pero tampoco en el de materias primas. Sin embargo el individuo esta accediendo cada vez mas a la mercancía genérica cuando aun esta conserva su nomenclatura comercial o el código que la organiza durante la producción. Aun con todo el esfuerzo del productor o comerciante por abrir en esta tabla de bagazo un umbral afectivo o de significados tropicales bajo el nombre de Cancún esta adolece de memoria, no puede asociarse a ningún sistema de objetos conocido, no existe ritual de uso relativo a esta tabla en la cultura. Es una materia cruda en términos productivos pero también en términos culturales.

Lo que esta ocurriendo es una inundación incontrolable a escala urbana de materia neutral. Un tsunami de lo genérico ha cubierto la ciudad mientras dormíamos. Los propios comerciantes y productores no reconocen aun el cambio de paradigma. Sin embargo el uso de nombres paradisíacos remite al modelo de hábitat y confort precedente lo que hace pensar que reconocen estar tratando con mercancías sin memoria social.

Esta situación remite parcialmente a proyectos como los de Gaetano Pesce y Global Tools. El acceso actual por los individuos a medios productivos y materiales diversificados, parecía utópico hace 40 años. Los habitantes de los edificios de Pesce podían definir por ellos mismos los espacios interiores y fachadas de sus apartamentos restringidos únicamente por su estructura física y la llegada de sistemas técnicos como agua y electricidad. Pero el individuo en los modelos de Pesce necesita hoy de habilidades para tratar con otras fuerzas infraestructurales: las regulaciones legales comunales, las imposiciones urbanísticas, de seguridad y constructivas. Estaría bien pasar uno de esos edificios de Pesce por la comisión de aprobación constructiva en Little Haiti. Una fuerza regulatoria tan poderosa como el tsunami que surte materia genérica en la urbe le daría posiblemente la forma que hoy tiene ese vecindario.
Sin embargo parece que en el campo restringido de las normas ocurren ciertos desajustes, desacomodos. Entre esos pliegues se filtran riachuelos intermitentes de prácticas individuales, astucias, entendimientos.

Pop-up store "Enter The Dragon"

Pienso que los cuerpos invasivos, que he creído ver, en los modelos de No-Stop City han aguzado su pronóstico. La urbe prevista por Archizoom alcanza con estos elementos intrusos una vigencia notoria. Ciertas prácticas vernáculas intrusivas, improvisadas, provisionales empiezan a ser recurrentes en determinados sectores urbanos acosados por condiciones económicas difíciles. Allí donde las regulaciones dejan vacíos legales se derraman gestos oportunistas, pragmáticos, en ocasiones parásitos². Los individuos en crisis tienen una conciencia de lo infraestructural, reconocen los torrentes donde es beneficioso meter un dedo para provocar un pequeño y momentáneo desvío.

Si el universo natural y el universo artificial genérico se parecen cada vez más. Si ambos pueden ser considerados torrentes productivos autónomos (la esfera de lo genérico parece auto generar y estructurar sus propias reglas, indiferentes del campo social inmediato.) Si ha ese caudal productivo que es la naturaleza fuimos capaces de entenderle sus ritmos, sus energías y la agricultura devino una sistematización de ese entendimiento, lo mismo podemos hacer con la producción genérica. Hay un tipo de diseño, que puede valerse de tácticas agrarias, una agricultura del campo genérico puede ser implementada.

El producto que he escogido para comenzar este proyecto de pop-up store y de una "agricultura" de lo genérico es la losa de vinyl adhesivo suministrada en Home Depot. En conjunto con otros recubrimientos, ya sean de pisos paredes o techos, albergan como muchas otras materias contemporáneas los signos de un sistema de valor que ha priorizado las métricas normalizadas, lo genérico y el tan cuestionado imperio de la homogenización industrial global.

El valor importante de esta materia es su carácter modular. Por el efecto de multiplicación, la producción seriada hace de la losa un vehículo de repetición y por tanto de expansión importantísimo, así como lo hacen los espejos en los proyectos de Archizoom. Aceptando este principio de expansión, e infiltrando la lógica reproductiva del patrón y para proveer esa ilusión expansiva, podemos, en lugar de aplicar un esperado recurso decorativo aplicar una conducta, una astucia, un gesto. En este caso estaremos dando la capacidad a ese gesto, a esa astucia, o a esa conducta de multiplicarse y extenderse hacia el infinito. O al menos, estaremos habilitando la potencialidad para esa expansión. Para alterar nuestras losas adhesivas compradas en Home Depot se pueden usar técnicas de graffiti y emplear métodos reproductivos paramétricos. Con el nuevo patrón estaremos creando un plano "decorativo" paralelo con nuevas implicaciones morales, un plano de decoración forajida. Y es que el método infiltra y parásita un lenguaje tecnológico, una lógica económica y un plano de expresión que parece cerrado y excluyente.

Este proyecto se auto declara temporal. Entiende que en el paisaje infinito de lo genérico los gestos vernáculos se disuelven, ruedan minúsculos hasta desaparecer, como los huesos de possum en la carretera interestatal I-95.

Ernesto Oroza Nov/2010

¹Andrea Branzi, La arquitectura soy yo, Architecture Radicale, Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, France, 2001

² Para una extensión de estas ideas ver: Gean Moreno, -Ernesto Oroza, Learning from Little Haiti. E-flux Journal #6, May, 2009. Para una lectura de otros textos asociados visite: www.thetabloid.org

Provisional chair Aventura, 2005-2011.
Founded metal bar chairs, monobloc plastic chairs and clothes.

see Provisional chair, 2005

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

Exhibition views

Critical Strategies of Post-Utopian Cuban Art (Cuba-United States). Curated by Adriana Herrera
Houston Fine Art Fair, Sept. 15 – 18, 2011.

The exhibition—featuring Consuelo Castañeda, Rubén Torres Llorca, Glexis Novoa, Ernesto Oroza and Gladys Triana—includes pieces (or re-mades) belonging to the period in which they lived on the island, and challenged the hegemonic system, along with artworks that are particularly strong in the production of a critical—and political, in a more general sense—vision of the United States. The exhibition is curated by Adriana Herrera, Miami-based independent curator and critical writer, and sponsored by Hardcore Contemporary Art Space, located in booth 602.

http://artecho.untecho.org/where.html

Inventory Series 02

Soul Does Matter

Curated by Thais Fontenelle
INVENTORY SERIES 02: 
SOUL DOES MATTER.
on view NOV 26 — DEC 4/2011
Vernissage Nov 26 7 — 11p
Buena Vista Bldg. 
180 NE 39 Street, #120
Design District, Miami

“Four minutes, thirty-three seconds”

Curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud
LegalArt, Miami.

La Otra, arte contemporáneo
21 al 26 de octubre 2011
Inauguración: Viernes, 21 de octubre, 8 PM
Horario General: Sábado 22 al Miércoles 26 de octubre, 11 AM - 8 PM
Domingo 23 de octubre, 11 AM - 6 PM
Evento de cierre: Miércoles 26 de octubre, 8 PM - 2 AM
Dirección: Edificio Panauto, Avenida Caracas con Calle 26, esquina sur oriental (parqueadero privado)
www.laotraproyectos.com

Results: Log's Second Ever Postcard Competition. October 2011

Pawnshop proprietors Julieta Aranda (in bowler) and Anton Vidokle, Ludlow Street, New York 2007.

ARE YOU AN ARTIST IN NEED OF FAST CASH?
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Pawnshop at Thessaloniki Biennial
18 September–18 November 2011

Editing Havana- Stories of Popular Housing

Maja Asaa, Mira Kongstein and Ernesto Oroza
with photographs by Frederikke Friderichsen
ISBN: 9788791984174
Published by Aristo Bogforlag July 2011
17x24 cm, 224p

ART@WORK PRESENTS ENEMIGO PROVISIONAL
Exhibition of Works by Ernesto Oroza
On View July 9 - August 31, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 16, 2011

Junge Szene Kuba
Pasinger Fabrik. Munich, 10.06.2011 - 24.07.2011.
Curated by Siegfried Kaden.

Pawnshop e-flux
Kopfbau Basel (twitter)

Enter the Nineties
MIAMI-DADE PUBLIC LIBRARY SYSTEM
June 16 - September 13, 2011
2nd floor exhibition space, Main Library, 101 W. Flagler Street, Miami
Reception: Thursday, June 16, 7-8:30pm
With special performances and a 14-foot inflatable moon courtesy of
MARILYN GOTTLIEB-ROBERTS and THE END
Read review by Anne Tschida

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

Download article

Artists Mapping Miami
Visitors are invited to explore the Main House with Oroza’s map from 6 – 7 pm.
Miami is a city in constant flux, whose landscape is redefined every few years. In the context of Archetype Vizcaya, this roundtable invites several
artists to present and discuss with the public their current projects on Miami and its shifting geographies.
...Participants include Kevin Arrow, Adler Guerrier, Nicolas Lobo, Gean Moreno, Ernesto Oroza, Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez, Lara Stein Pardo and Cesar Trasobares.
Moderator: Flamina Gennari-Santori, Vizcaya’s Deputy Director for Collection and Curatorial Affairs
Tickets $5; free for Members, Seniors and Students with ID.

ARCHETYPE VIZCAYA: a commission by Ernesto Oroza (view images and texts)
March 4 – May 29, 2011
Thursday, March 3 · 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Vizcaya Museum & Gardens
3251 South Miami Avenue
Miami, FL

Voices: Ernesto Oroza at Gallery 400, Chicago
http://gallery400.blogspot.com/

Architecture of Necessity at INOVA
Curated by Nicholas Frank (press release)
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts
Jan 21 2011 - Mar 13 2011, Opening reception on 1/21 from 5-8pm.
Exhibition's views

INOVA/Kenilworth
2155 North Prospect Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53202

Improvising Architectures Christy Gast, Adler Guerrier, Nicolas Lobo, Ernesto Oroza, Viking Funeral, Graham Hudson, Felipe Arturo, Heather Rowe and Carlos Sandoval de León
Curated by Gean Moreno
Project opening January 13th 2011


ENTER THE DRAGON Pop-up shop, Ernesto Oroza, 2010

Artist of the Month of October 2010
October Curator: Rene Morales
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
The Bridge Downtown interview here

The Bridge Downtown
Posted on October 10, 2010 by theartistofthemonthclub

Selected by Rene Morales, Associate Curator at the Miami Art Museum, October’s Artists of the Month are Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza. Here, we talk about their six-tabloid digital print edition.

Q: What is the stone structure at the center of the image?

A: The stone structure is an artificial grotto that we found in a landscape nursery. We are using it as a stand-in for what we are calling the pre-city. This pre-city is a kind of abstract plane made up of recurring shapes and materials and colors, filtered through sedimented accumulation of zoning and building codes, that determine what the city will look like. We think it’s there in the repeating vegetation and garden ornaments in plant nurseries, in the prefabricated trusses in the roofing company, in the standard metrics according to which everything is cut in the building materials depot. It’s as if all the different shapes that will make up the city find in these objects their elementary particles. All that we need is to put the individual parts together and we end up with a city like Miami.

Bienvenidos a Miami

Q: The pre-city comes to exist through a filter of regulation, but what about demand and necessity?  Could that be as essential as regulation to the accumulation of a city?

A: The city, as a generic structure, happens at the interface between different forces. One of these is represented by regulation, legal precedent, climatological and other adaptations, and the habits of the citizenry. Another force is embodied in the myriad forms and metrics of what we call the pre-city. And yet another is taste/demand. We think of taste not in relation to some endowment to recognize or enjoy the “good things” in life, but as the manifestation of the systematic demands of a particular social group. These different forces are often interdependent, but it is at the points where they meet head-on that the city’s morphologies emerges.

Butt Johnson, Starchitects, 2009-10

Q: How does it relate to the format of 6 Tabloids?

A: If the pre-city opens a parenthesis, there is a post-city that closes it. Between them, however, there is only an absence where the traditional city once unfolded. We think of places like the salvage yard and the souvenir shop as part of this post-city. It’s not so much where waste goes as were things are deposited which index a change of fashion or building codes, an error in production, or an over-distillation of meaning. These places are almost like large sedimented scabs.

Q: Okay, so you are saying that the junk – souvenirs and waste are junk, just in different ways – becomes an index of expired tastes and needs?  That what we either discard as trash or commemorate as kitsch (like snowglobes and miniature Eiffel Towers) could tell an outsider about a city’s consumption patterns?  Or do you mean something different than that?

Wish You Were Here?

A: Well, within the examples we gave there are certain differences. Although we consider both part of what we are calling a post-city, the salvage yard and the souvenir shop behave in different ways. An important distinction we want to make is between the landfill and the salvage yard–or amorphous junk and the kind of diagrammatic reading that the salvage yard affords us. In the salvage yard one can discern a number of legal, technological, and social changes. A proliferation of doors, for instance, may index a change in building codes. There is also in the way that the salvage yard functions as a commercial entity this process of evacuating cultural value from artifacts, so that they again return to a condition of raw material. One can image the endless rows of pink and pastel blue toilets in the salvage yard morphing into the terrassae that fills in the mosaics in the children’s museum. Garbage, on the other hand, seems to take on its own hard symbolic qualities.

The souvenir shop is different. On the one hand, it participates in the post-city as a kind of trader in dead meanings. It portrays, on the surface, the city not as a lively generative matrix of forces, but as a symbolic construct. It employs widely-shared conventions. Yet, on the other hand, the souvenir, as part of a massive productive system, in the challenges it puts to our safeguarding of stable identity, seems more up-to-date than most objects. It understands generic production. It treats identity as something that is “stamped” on a set of generic artifacts. It invites us to consider a new notion of city-identity, one that is perhaps is more attuned to our global trading networks, our massive communicative infrastructures, and the proliferation of generic production. While it houses obsolete symbols, it seems ahead of most things in its understanding of contemporary production. In this way, it closes the loop: it is both part of the post-city in its tired semiotic inventory, and it is part or emblematic of the pre-city in the understanding of morphologies and processes of the generic.

Q: That’s a fascinating concept, that the souvenir can be a lingering signifier of a city, while it also can be a building block for the inchoate pre-city.  Today’s gift shop is tomorrow’s salvage yard. Given your interest in trading, communication, and production at the global level, why do you take on the “the City” as your subject?

A: But there is no difference between the city and the global networks of trading, communication and production. Or another way to say this: cities are just points of compression in these networks.

FALL MARKET AT DCOTA
ART + DESIGN: THE NEW GENERATION
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 10, 2010
To download the Fall Market Program (PDF): Click here