ARTIST'S STATEMENT

These carts' lives belong to the past. Though they may be beautified and used to decorate a garden, or refurbished for use as museum pieces, these new uses represent neither a continuation of the carts' past lives nor a rebirth, but are instead a confirmation of their death. This is why we do not appreciate them. They have no meaning, they have nothing to say to us.

The Cart Cemetery project was conceived with the goal of giving the carts meaning again. Though it may not be possible for them to mean to us what they meant to the many men and women who used them years ago in their work in the fields, what we can do is attempt to give them new meaning from an artistic perspective. The idea is to put the carts back into history through artistic interventions.

With this end in mind, we adopted the image of a cemetery or graveyard on the Putaendo plain, an authentic cart graveyard, understood in the sense of an "elephant graveyard," a place for the carts to go when they know that their end is near and where they will be prepared for their new life. Preparation will consist of interventions designed to assure their preservation. Diverse techniques will be employed, depending on the condition the carts are in. Some will be modified using a technique we call "lost wood," in which each cart is encased in a sort of armor made of soldered pieces of iron (these pieces of iron should come from the community itself, and be, preferably, of domestic, agricultural or mining origin). Once the metal-plating process is complete, the wooden cart inside will be burned and its impression preserved in iron.

Other carts will be immersed in concrete in the same way that some insects are preserved in amber. The cart will be deposited in a metal box, into which concrete will be poured until the cart is completely covered. Once the concrete is set, the mold will be opened, and the block containing the cart placed on the plain as part of the landscape, in the hope that a thousand years from now, people will find the way to "dis-cover" the cart hidden within. The cart is "paleontologized" in this technique.

The concrete immersion technique will include the pouring of various smaller blocks containing pieces of carts. Each of these will be numbered, and a date fixed on which it is to be opened, revealing its contents. The dis-covery of the contents of these smaller blocks will be carried out sequentially, perhaps one every ten years, leading up to the final dis-covery of the whole cart.

Time, no longer a cause of decrepitude, preserves here. The consecutive nature of the blocks' revelation will allow successive generations to relate to the cart-objects, to see themselves as cart "paleontologists" and to discover new ways of experiencing time. The presence of the concrete helps to emphasize the anti-nostalgic character of the project.

The making of a "virtual cart", with no past and no stories to tell, has also been contemplated within the scope of the project. This cart would be newly made, encased in iron and burned like the antique carts, as testimony to the fact that the past is a construction of the present. All these activities will take place outdoors, on the Putaendo plain, in view of all. The cart interventions will be public, carried out on pre-announced dates as part of popular celebrations.

When we repeat things, we inject them with new life. In this sense, the cart preserved as an iron replica of itself or the white block in the middle of the landscape are explanations of the old wooden cart which allow it to continue living. The results of these interventions, and of others as yet unimagined, will be neither ornaments nor symbols of the past nor museum pieces. Rather, they will be historically-inspired sculptures which will not trigger sterile nostalgias but instead, will project present and future possibilities, as play structures, meeting points, final goals for hikes and excursions. They may be praised or criticized as objects of art. They will belong to everyone and to no one.

The project is intended to be a work in process. The incorporation of additional carts will suggest further possibilities involving the introduction of other techniques and materials. The fact that the project is designed to take place in the open air, freely accessible to all, will also encourage contributions and influences from varied sources. The enthusiasm already shown by the community suggests that this project will not bear the imprint of just one source.