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CASAS

CASAS

Mariana Rolon
December 26, 2017
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CASAS is an urban intervention composed of five anthropomorphic automatons that carry their houses on their backs. It was assembled during the month of September 2017 in an emblematic corner of Buenos Aires and has won the "Special Projects" award of the Young Art Bienal of Buenos Aires.
After a first visual blow in which one gets carried away by the sympathy and the details of the automatons, the narration becomes; CASAS is suspended in time, as a fable in which the role of each of his characters loads to visual poetry to the work.



The genre automatons in itself works as a metaphor of our lives, of our society. The human being that doesn't stop, simply for the sake of doing. In my case, the idea was to generate an urban intervention but avoiding all kinds of grandiloquence, that's why the choice of scale for automatons. I always wanted CASAS to be loaded as a romantic reading for the spectator, that once you see these characters the encounter becomes magical. "Suddenly, in the middle of the city, what are these people doing there?" The design of the characters is strongly linked to industrial design, cold in its form but in contrast to the warmth of the animal characteristics that each one of them carries. They generate tension and contrast of contradictory readings, the colors, indirectly refer to our flag, Argentina, light blue, white and the golden color of the sun. Therefore, the intervention, with its multiple interpretations, speaks of the reality of each of the Argentines.


As with all my projects, I started with a pencil and a paper. Then, I designed the characters in Adobe Illustrator defining the characteristics of each of them in 2D. At the time of producing them specifically I counted on a great team that helped me, first to bring the characters I had made to 3D, being able to define all its forms, details, textures, etc. Then, the pieces were printed. They were finished so that the surface is very smooth and uniform and then they went through the painting process. In parallel, it was built everything that had to do with the mechanics of automatons to finally assemble all the pieces.

The response was very pleasant because the intervention transits the edge between the poetic and the figurative that aroused the opinion of the spectators. "Some saw people who left their native country to live elsewhere," "People kicked out from their homes," "The woman who took everything because she found out that her husband was cheating on her," others told me something like "The daily load, work, family, etc, etc ... ". The truth is that the answers were very rich and varied.

Urban intervention consisting of five automatons mounted on the facade
of the ex Patronato de la Infancia during the last week of September 2017.

Won a prize for “special projects” of La Bienal de Arte Joven Buenos Aires.

Nombre de la Obra: CASAS
Autor: Mariano Sigal
Dirección de proyecto: Roco Corbould
Diseño Personajes: Mariano Sigal y Roco Corbould
Realizadoras: Julieta La Valle y Julieta Iacono
Ingeniero Mecánico: Diego De Sancho
Producción general: Irina Ivnisky / Loly Carnero
Cinematography: Agustín Di Grazia / Gemelos Photography
Making Of: Nicolás Dodi

Mariana Rolon

We are CINCO, a multidisciplinary design studio
where we create visual expressions combining film making,
photography, art direction and graphic design.

We want each of our projects to reflect
the people behind it. We believe and trust the idea of our work
as something imperfectly perfect. Just human.

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