“Greek light” – Modular lamp made out with Napalm B (colored polystyrene and gasoline) Ernesto Oroza, 2013

More info at: Navidad en el Kalahari, Cristo Salvador Galeria, Sept – Habana, 2013

Ernesto Oroza. Ujamaa (diagrams) – 2012

More info here: http://www.ernestooroza.com/category/ujamaa/

Crystal Radio (Radio a Galena), 2011. Ernesto Oroza, Gean Moreno.
“Radio a galena” is an rudimentary crystal radio that function without a conventional power source. They are housed inside milk crate casings which are then stacked in towers. Early versions of the modern radio as we’ve come to know it, Crystal Radios convert electromagnetic radio waves into alternating electric currents.

Ernesto Oroza. Updating City  (theorem). 2000-2010

Updating City (theorem). 2000-2010
Founded metal bars chairs, monobloc plastic chairs, metal bars.

Objects of necessity
In certain contemporary urban areas the necessity generates objects that look more the result of an unavoidable sedimentation of materials cornered by the wind into the shapes of the city than the result of a productive activity.
Broken metal chairs loosen from a school and plastic chairs, also broken, expelled from a cafeteria, nearly one piece each month, they ramble around the neighborhood until they get tangentially trapped inside a human activity: a security guard, a street vendor, a ruined bus stop, a mechanic having his business on the sidewalk. It happens everywhere at the same time, as if a hypothetical grid formed by all the broken plastic seats in the city fit by gravity with the gridded field of metal broken chairs spread years ago around Havana. The necessity generates a fatal equation that, under similar circumstances, produces the same results. The individual in need will focus exclusively the repertoire of the usefulness, propitiating a conjunction, a harvest time.

Little Havana Lamp shade. 2008-2009
Clear silicone.

In 1994, in a factory in Los Pinos neighborhood in Havana, after a black-out, a Japanese machine used to produce medical instruments in acrylic got clogged with the hot, melted material inside. The factory’s chief of production quickly ordered all the acrylic, still in a liquid state, to be removed. As the workers pushed the material out, they created a fine cascade of melted pink acrylic that began to accumulated on the floor. Some of the workers, molding it with their hands, began to improvise the shapes of lamps, ashtrays and decorative bowls.
In a few weeks, this technical principle extended throughout the island and individuals began to assemble in their own homes machine that repeated this productive process in which hand gestures were fused with industrial technological principles.

I am interested in how immigrants interpret new technologies and the universal and standard stock of materials that can be found in stores like Home Depot. And how these “technological goods,” available to recent arrivals or to individuals formed in a different a “technological age,” start to insert themselves as possible variants in the home and within the immigrant’s dynamics of survival, in places like Little Haiti and Hialeah. In this sense, I am interested in investigating the meeting of this universal stock with local cultural demands, be they decorative impulses, constructive understandings, or simply religious practices. Processes of hybridization have the potential to open access to innovation, destroying and creating logics and sense, provoking excesses, invasions and reciprocal contaminations that have important repercussions in the city where they happen.

Collected lamp. Los Pinos-Havana. 1995

With this lamp project I revise some of Gaetano Pesce’s ideas regarding hybridity of productive processes. Pesce proposes that new technologies are more open to intersecting with variable elements that change their course. He has said, for instance, that computerized production systems should be invaded by viruses, algorhythms capable of inserting distortion into the repetition of mass production, material elements and mechanical forces that will always producing objects that are always different.

Technical info:
Technological Disobedience’s series: Lampshades, 2009
The lamps are produced in two sizes. Two or five tubes of clear silicone (10.1 Oz) are used, respectively.
The material is applied on geometric forms such as shoe boxes and bowls.
The object is completed with electric parts.
Prototype 1: 18”x12”x11”
Prototype 2: 10”x7”x9”

Centro de información. Archivo y arquitectura en proceso. 2009
T-shirts impresos, provenientes de tiendas de segunda mano, se utilizan para fabricar cojines de 16”x16”.
Esta tipología de archivo permite que la documentación devenga su propia arquitectura.
Las dos primeras ediciones de estos cojines fueron desarrolladas en colaboración con Gean Moreno:
– Modelo de expansion Quebec, 2010. Catastrophe? Quelle Catastrophe?, Quebec Biennial.
– Decoy, 2010. Farside Gallery, Miami.

Information Center. Ongoing archive and architecture. 2009
Printed t-shirts, from thrift stores, used to make cushions 16 “x16”.
This typology of archive allows the documentation becomes in, or self generate, its own architecture.
Two firsts editions developed in collaboration with Gean Moreno:
– Model of expansion (Qebec) Catastrophe? Quelle Catastrophe?, 2010. Quebec Biennial, Quebec.
– Decoy, 2010. Farside Gallery, Miami.

Ernesto Oroza. Updating City (theorem). 2009

Updating City (theorem). 2009
Founded metal bars chairs and monobloc plastic chairs, tube.