JUAN LINARES AND ERIKA ARZT

An installation as a poetic surface and narrative context displaying the results of a failed meeting between a community-based effort to manage its surroundings and the local authorities, who in their management of public space only make all-too-evident the lack thereof.  

In March 2006 the artists Juan Linares and Erika Arzt made a proposal to the

Orcasitas Residents Association: to begin a creative process through which it would be possible to develop a strategy for incorporating the subjective ideas and personal vision of the inhabitants of the place into its legal urban ordenances.  This is how an idea was come up with: to work with an abandoned high tension tower as a symbol of the residents' demands, which led to the tower's wires being buried up.  Some residents wanted the tower to be taken down, while others preferred it be left standing as an expression of local identity, history and the fight to preserve the area.  Several meetings between the artists and the residents concluded with an idea: to turn the old high tension tower into a hanging garden that would have a special place in the neighborhood.  After a long negotiation process with public administration officials, however, the necessary permits were not awarded and the project was halted; the renovated tower cannot be put to its new intended use.