CASA TLACUACHE
bringing our land to life,
and life to our land through
art, ecology & leyendas
un proyecto de 
Ricardo Alberto Ramirez Garcia-Rojas  y
Marcelo Alejandro Ramirez Garcia-Rojas

This project highlights the engagement that we want to create in the Casa Tlacuache. We want to engage the community of the Rio Grande Valley to gain a new perspective on an old neighbor, the Tlacuache. 

 

Project undertaken as part of residency with Laboratorio Artístico de San Agustín (LASA) for their 10th annual Public Sessions. Since its founding in 2008, LASA has been striving towards enriching culture in the San Agustín neighborhood of Havana, Cuba through contextual, participatory art projects which expose the community to a variety of artistic expressions while enriching their own perceptions and experiences with art. The 2017 Public Sessions, as part of an ongoing project studying Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, brought together a team of international artists to individually contextualize the theory within the framework of the local community for their respective projects.

 

The project focused on the second level of Maslow’s hierarchy--security needs--which consisted of audio/visual, sculptural, and participatory elements. First a series of community members were interviewed and asked the question, “What constitutes security in your home?” Responses were edited and presented to the community in a short film titled, “2° Nivel: una investigación sobre la seguridad en San Agustín” which featured the audio of responses collected to the backdrop of daily life in the community.

 

The sculptural and participatory components of the “Ascendencia de la Población” project consisted of creating a typical residential building of the San Agustín neighborhood in the form of a rising spiral. Community members of all ages were invited to participate in the project by writing their responses to the above mentioned question and signing said responses on the sculpture itself. The results yielded a plethora of responses that covered the entire sculpture.

 

Interestingly, many of the responses were oftentimes repeated by different participants revealing not only the the shared nature of values in a home setting within the community, but also how these values are cross-generational in nature. In signing their responses the participants and the community at large were able to appropriate the sculpture, as well as give the idea that the community itself and interactions within the community constitute the security of the home for a number of individuals.