Mariela Limerutti Visual Artist, Argentina.


CUBES
Installation in a shop
San Juan, Argentina, 2003
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CUBES

A business premises is not only a space to sell goods. As a semi public space, encounters, exchanges, changes of goods and also of languages, words and desires take place there.

Not only the employees but the public as well, were important in the production of this work, and in the value of it. The people that worked in this shop were a group of social individuals inside this reduced space; whose aspirations, problems and illusions surely represented many of the desires of the clients of the premises and the rest of the inhabitants of the city too. The desires represent part of the identity of a town. The written texts on the cubes were the people that usually work in this shop and the clients´ wishes for the New Year. The intervention in this shop focused the attention not on some decoration object, but on the architectural frame containing the people, the goods and the whole development of activities in the place.

Contrary to the traditional sculpture, Minimal Art worked the presentation of the object like a representation of itself, often using the cube to do it. When taking the sculpture in its spatiality and context, the specific place for which this work and its relationship with the space were generated, gained importance here. The cube played with collective imaginary meanings as a box, a container, a closed space loaded with different meanings; cubes of illusions to express desires; a magic box at a human scale. A geometric body, closed form, which symbolizing the material world and representing the function of inhabiting. Cubes that have an internal space of welcome, and an external surface that allows the writing expression of those desires. The identity of the shop was worked through the cube as a characteristic element of the place, taking it as a module because of the glass cube in the entrance of the shop.

The work opened a space to the client inside and outside the shop making him participate. Apart from the object, the behaviour that it generated was also important here. The proposal to express a Christmas wish by writing is a way of materializing it, of making it real in the text. Thus, the work attempted to rescue those personal wishes in a space of freedom, since they are generally conditioned by advertising.

Derrida says that to write means to graft. A graft of someone who writes, perhaps as an inclusion in the bigger text that contains the speech of Christmas and New Year.