Subte Store was an installation I developed during the award-exhibition “Salón Anual Municipal de Artes Visuales 2007″. My project was selected with other 9 more by an international jury (Alicia Haber -Uruguay-, Cecilia Brunson -Chile-, Eva Gringstein -Argentina-). In this store you could buy different stuff made by local contemporary and fine artist, including rejected projects for that exhibition, some of the selected ones too and artworks from artist that presented themselves in the web site of the project. http://subtestore.ustedes.net
In this place I also organised other activities -like presentations of magazines made by artists or about art, with the participation of the magazines “RAMONA” and “Atypica” from Argentina, “revista rojo” from Spain and “Pimba!” from Uruguay. In this frame I also presented an original first issue of the art magazine “ARTURO” from 1944.
This public Cultural Center didn’t have any store in it, so, the camouflage was perfect.
“(…)’I ultimately began conceiving my own projects, in which to this day I try to fuse art, architecture, design and spectacle on multiple levels.’ At first glance these interdisciplinary hybrids are playful, but they are based on highly complex and detailed considerations. Their multilayered nature is perhaps clearest in one particular project that Ridao created in the context of a contemporary culture center in Montevideo. In 2004 he initially donated to the center a brand, or rather a new brand identity, and various means of communication. A gift Ridao almost sees as his duty as a citizen. The center would not have been able to afford to have a new visual identity developed specifically for it and, as he says, “If you see garbage lying around, it’s perfectly normal to pick it up and throw it in the trash can.
In this case visual garbage meant to represent a public cultural institution. “So in 2006 I proposed a project there, a kind of art salon. My own artis tic contribution was the installation of a store like those you find at muse ums today. This culture center didn’t have anything like that. The art salon ultimately took place and a selection of ten artworks were judged. Includ ing my spatial intervention. I set up my allocated space like a regular store with a sales counter and used the corporate design I had already con ceived for the culture center. The camouflage was perfect.” The store and culture center formed a single visual unit. The items Ridao sold there in cluded the works of those artists rejected by the curators of the actual ex hibitions. In this quasiprivate space he had created within the public space of the culture center, he also organized his own events. The exhibi tion visitors did not perceive the border between art and reality. They saw Ridao not as an artist who had copied a museum store as part of an artistic installation, but a normal owner of a normal store. They asked him about works in the exhibition and bought the exhibition catalog from him, which in turn he had designed himself, and in which his store was present ed as a work in the exhibition. At first glance a pure prank – on closer in spection masterful mimicry, a game of confusion between art and reality and their ontological gray areas.(…)”
from the article “USTED the experiments of You” by Michael Naser. 2012, Outlook Magazine “Building Perspectives” Architektur, Design und Technik I Architecture, Design and Technology. ISSUE # 15 “Smart Future”. Pages: 50 to 54, Frankfurt, Germany (view full article here: http://messelogo.de/outlook-nr-15/index.html )
