LIMIT

Daiset Ruz-Sarqus.

The industry for consumption goods, hegemonic organ of social and economic policies, acts by respecting an absurd maxim: build to destroy as a condition of progress. Limit is a collective that works to generate research spaces where the notions of garbage and waste are disturbed. We are particularly interested in industrial waste as a trace or track of production relations and evidence of material contradictions and social inequality. At the end of the work day, the worker and the material are conceived as residues, spent by the workforce, by its functions and qualities, having been consumed to obtain an ephemeral object. Through collective actions and workshops in collaboration with workers from industries that produce consumption goods, we seek to stimulate public reflection regarding labor alienation and work fragmentation that disengage the worker from the final product. During these workshops we explore the qualities and meanings of industrial waste from specific companies, in a creative and playful process of appropriation of the material. During the final stage of the workshop, an object is generated from transformation of the material. The final product from this process challenges the system of production and consumption, since an alternate variable to the classic model of material economy is inserted: waste is the basic component of the art piece and the worker is not simply another piece in the industrial chain, but rather the direct author of an object made at his will. Thus, stability and liberty are found in this waste, the material is freed from its function and the worker freed from his industrial identity. The transformation of matter generates the possibility of re-appropriation, self-definition, and the freedom to decide, without production lines that determine functions and useful life. Likewise, Limits work disturbs notions of public and private property and their relationship with consumption, since as soon as materials cross the conventional frontier of functionality they become waste and enter the sphere of what is public, from where they will be recovered thanks to the creative work by workers. The transformation of materials from Limits intervention is subordinate to humans, who once emancipated from their identity of producer-consumer, manage for the resulting objects to be displaced from the pragmatic world to the symbolic realm, suspended between their births and wearing out, between the fragile and arbitrary relation of the public and the private. Trace, monument, document: Limits projects Waste before waste is Limits main interest. Objects obtained from Limits work become monuments, magnified traces, and tracks of production relations that include the cracks and crevices of the systems they document. These monuments do not embody the deconstruction of the consumption good and their nave utopias, but rather the gestation of critical objects. Next, some of these attempts are described:

BABEL
From residual plastic letters of a company devoted to assembling typography and logotypes on rubber mats, a collective dynamic was detonated with workers from this industry. To forge an irruption into the daily labor, a glossary of words generated spontaneously by each participant was created, in the manner of a self-portrait that was mixed randomly. Also, the typographies were violated by using them to create new sentences. Later, the phrases were placed on a mound that diluted the phrases made, creating a loop, a cycle where tongues and sentences were overlapped in Babel mode until virtually losing their meaning, which continued to exist potentially. At the same time these gave the possibility of free articulation in the spectators mind. Finally, crowning the piece, a single linearly legible legend was presented: Partial or total reproduction of this $/(#!* is prohibited...

JASINTO
To prop up a wooden idler is to build a personal coordinate and affirm oneself in it. The construction industry is in charge of covering idlers on wooden falseworks with faades and finished luster. The construction industry sees so much falsework wood go by as building workers. Often, a bricklayer is trapped in a construction wall; this is accepted with normalcy as a sacrifice for that which is being built. An unfinished construction is a dream of the future, the gestation of a space that is almost never used by those who build it. A monument is a reiteration of the past and that which aims to be installed in the future over others as permanent propaganda. Jasinto is a monument for the bricklayer, a sculpture gesture in collaboration with an excellent worker from this industry. It stems from the question: what is behind a monument?