Inventory of the first carton to harvest cartons

In the exhibition of the Modern will be seen three of the four cars that composed the original series of Liliana Maresca, exhibited in the C.C. Recoleta in December 1990. From an actual chariot, which borrowed from the guarnas of the Warnes hostel-it was the word that named them then-he created an ideal model. Next to him he exhibited another car with real objects but intervened, painted white; Whitewashed, let's say, basic operation to denote hygiene. And it also added two beautiful sculptures of small size in cast bronze, one bathed in silver 1000 and another in gold of 24 K. All this composed the sample under the title "Recolecta", an irony between the wink and the Chicana to the neighborhood. The two large trolleys on display are now reconstructions from the photos: the "car of the real" was obtained in a cooperative of cartoneros of Barracas, and this "white car" was made from the one that was reconstructed for the museum Macro of Rosario in 2003, since the original was destroyed or lost. Thus, despite the illusions of realism, none of them is faithful to the cartoneros of our time. They do not reflect their needs nor are they a literal pledge of the class struggle which, according to Fabian Lebenglick, who was closely associated with the artist, ruled the Maresca universe. With the signature of Lebenglick, the text of "Recolecta" warned: "The owners tremble because of the uncontainable proliferation of the cirujeo. But this lumpen on the rise is the protagonist of the new Argentina ... Conceptual art? No sir. The culmination of realism. "Let's look at that car of the early 90's. It had some tie with the tradition of the immigrant rag-that collector of ruins claimed by Joseph Roth and Walter Benjamin, who found treasures in the garbage. To begin with, if he recovered objects of home use it was because there was still a home, a roof, no matter how miserable it was.

Already, says the critic, Liliana saw in the cartoneros the future of the country: "Menem began and detected the signs of deindustrialization before anyone else. As he lived in San Telmo, he was in contact with heavy areas of the city. And he had that constant to turn the lowest into a jewel. "

The sculpture of the cart bathed in gold is the size of a desk trophy, let's say, it's a sort of Chapuza award. It evokes, in tone of game, a historical model that in its day was pioneer; It could be, for example, the scale prototype of the Ford T of the carton.

It was some years after this show that the basic garbage began to be considered food worthy of recycling. Domestic matter seemed to be subdivided into minute particles of food, slabs of crumbs, lumps. In 2001 César Aira published La Villa, a novel whose beginning contains the most realistic pages of all his literature and which focuses on the choreography of the carton family as a unit of "production".

At the beginning of 2002 was such a growth of the cirujeo for life and so extravagant cars, that with a photographer friend we plan a portfolio. The inspiration was to compare them with Maresca: rent cars to their owners, inventory the harvest of each car - as if it were a study of bromatology in the second degree (is it not through the study of garbage that determines consumption In those months, when there were still no cooperatives or those huge trucks that fortunately abbreviated the superhuman hauling circuits and replaced the "white trains" of Sarmiento and Miter, the models Showed a mutant originality. Many had become bicycle couplings, "trailers" -the association with the motor home and leisure is hurtful- that allowed the industrial carton to be lifted from supermarkets. The trailers also served to take turns between pedaling and "gathering"; Were adapted to baby carriages and at night, in the vicinity of Plaza Italia, disengaged from the bike, some became a bunk and let one foot between the rags. In 2003 the poet Daniel Samoilovich published The cart of Eneas, a poetic narration dedicated to the carton, in delicate parody to Virgilio. With the rise of the cooperatives, the cars reached standardization horizontally.