COCHE/LEB

Ever since it was invented, the car has figured in 20th century art as a symbol of modernity, youth, energy, power, daring, movement and also of innovation, progress and rebellion. In his well-known futurist manifesto, Marinetti expressed it thus: "a racing car, which appears to run over shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victoria of Samothrace".

But now in the 21st century something has happened to the symbol, it has been conquered by the decadent mobs, as everything else that once was solid, will melt into air.

The conflagration of November 2005 was not a result of extreme dispossession, as it is often portrayed. It was, on the contrary, a complete possession of a territory. People can burn cars because they are pissed off, but to keep the riots going for a month, while keeping the police in check – to do that you have to know how to organize, you have to establish complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly, and share a common language and a common enemy. Mile after mile and week after week, the fire spread. New blazes responded to the original ones, appearing where they were least expected. Rumors can’t be wiretapped.

Everything that loses its usefulness or stops working, expires, ceases its days of living is set aside automatically from the circulation, out of sight and is relegated to a imposed exile, what we might call the exiles of the useless, by to adopt a general term that encompasses these spaces (scrap yards or cemeteriescar, cemeteries, landfills, psychiatric, etc..) provided peripherals, which is crammed, so chosen and differentiated, all out of service, unusable, discharged; litter, detritus.

This decontextualization, or exile as we like to designate it for reasons of economy of language leads us to ask a "what if ..." making a round trip down to these containers useless, we rescue one of these objects in exile and in a return journey, the object-subject recontextualizamos returning to the area of ​​origin for which it was designed, but giving it a different value which would correspond to, thus causing a decontextualization with respect to the function of the object. It is as if a continuation of the journey propusiéramos urinal Duchamp original recolocándolo him out of the museum and in a bath but not as a work of art or even as urinaro but such as sink.

One of the objectives of this action is a speech-reflection triggered by this method of comparison, contrast, or as we prefer to call it, shock (we refer again to the advantages of economy of language) between the useful and the useless, or better since the utility does have though is different from the original, between function and dysfunction (defined as the jump dysfunction caused by the mismatch between design and shape of the object and we assign new utility). We are creating a monster (machine bacilli), a stranger, an inconsistency (new state conditioned by its unique nature, it does not have peers and, therefore does not form society-which, as we will see or want to test, will lead to another exile, not geographical but identity-a car out of a junkyard, transformed into a lounge area and repositioned on the streets remains a monster both in the center of the city, and scrapping in a house, it is a frankenstein is which no longer place nor in the world of the living nor the of the dead)...