LAS TOSCAS’ CAROUSEL

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What happened?

The Las Toscas’ carousel, which is in the central square of the town, was disabled, locked with a lock. The iron rods were rusted, the gear creaked. There was no cart there. It was all empty and forgotten. The painting with colorful illustrations of cartoon characters was also peeling, but one could still imagine how all that had once been. Maybe it was not so old.

The scene was a bit contradictory if we think that Las Toscas is a city with a high rate of young people and children. Leonardo Remor, an artist from Porto Alegre (Brazil), when he arrived in the village he soon realized: there was a little girl waiting for him with a big poster that said “Leonardo, welcome … I was waiting for you, the door is open”.

Leonardo dined at school, along with the children, which ended up making it possible to bond with the youth there. Curious, they wanted to know what he was doing, where he came from, which was, after all, to be a “contemporary artist.”

A few days after his arrival, between a busy schedule of visits, conversations and tours, since everyone had a certain interest in living with this newcomer, Leonardo finds the carrousel carts at the back of the delegation. With the help of all the children in the city, these carts would not stay there for long.

Dragging these pieces back and forth, they begin to distribute these trolleys around town, or rather, begin to return them to their natural habitat. The little pig moves to the pigsty, the duck joins the geese, the train approaches where the railway line and the spacecraft passed … well, the spacecraft lands in the open soybean field.

This arrangement of the carts in different points of the region, reactivating them according to the place where they were inserted, yielded a photographic series. In addition, he also produced a video recording the children of Las Toscas playing with the disabled carousel. The photographic series that emerged from the program of residence of Leonardo Remor was intended to be fragmented and distributed by different inhabitants of the village, each one, taking a photograph inside his house. Thus, in order to symbolically reconstruct the merry-go-round with all its trolleys, the person should move around in the same process of displacement predicted by the game.

Let’s keep talking …

The work proposed by Leonardo Remor does not only imply a photographic series, developed in the middle of the public scenario of Las Toscas. More than that, it can be perceived as a collaborative action between the artist and the residents: the small residents of the region.

By activating the young people who live there and who are growing there, Leonardo proposes to them another relation with this space: a propositive relation, of exploration of territory, of game. It suggests to them (and with them) the reasoning of production and group solution. Thus, all of them, by appropriating a problem and enabling ways of solving it, work towards a collective construction. And as a result, the cultural funding provided in this residency program generates an action that reflects the dialogue between art and community. But it is worth noting that this does not prevent convergence with a possible art market.

The photographs taken by Leonardo Remor are an example of how an artistic action geared to social processes can also function within the museum or gallery.

At the same time, Leonardo’s work evokes an articulation between community, space and institution. If the carousel is a toy made available by the municipality, realizing its abandonment is also a way of triggering a conscience in the social body as well as a criticity on the part of the residents on the efficiency of the state management.

The padlock that prevented the movement of the carousel sounded like a metaphor for the lock of state mechanisms. This artistic gesture mobilizes the individual as a subject belonging to the urban space and participatory in the administrative problems associated with public apparatuses.

On the other hand, symbolically, the carousel allows us a trip. To climb into it is to immerse yourself in a displacement – in a temporal and spatial rotation – but whose itinerary repeats itself constantly. The reiteration of this path, identical and conformable, is nothing more than a walk in circles. Perhaps, taking these carts to other places in the city, outside its central axis and beyond the main square, is a suggestion of breakage. It is a way to break with repetition and to make them go further. If in the carousel the route does not get you anywhere, in the work of Leonardo Remor it was possible to think of other trips, other routes and other destinations.
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Jorge Sepúlveda T., Guillermina Bustos, Paola Fabres

COMUNITARIA Residency, 2016
Lincoln, Argentina