The Kid and the Fridge | Carole Louis

Carole Louis

The focus of the 2021 SACO Contemporary Art Biennial was Flood –in memory of the 1991 flood that devastated Antofagasta, located in the Atacama Desert, one of the driest deserts in the world. An invitation to evoke and reflect upon the permanent possibility of imminent catastrophe, and how humanity would overcome it –if at all. Thanks to the Federation of Wallonia-Brussels, I was invited to propose a project.

While browsing through Wikipedia, I discovered Tapu, an ancient ritual from Rapa Nui - I also didn’t realize that the Easter Islands were part of Chile; geography was never my forte. Tapu was a way to prevent the depletion of natural resources, by means of local and temporary prohibition of their use. In a contemporary reflection on this ritual, I imagined burying several refrigerators in the desert.

After my project proposal had been selected, the organizers of SACO shared an urban legend with me, according to which a child survives the floods by hiding in a fridge. Again: I obviously knew nothing about it, but was pleasantly surprised by the overlap between this tale and my initial idea. The location I chose for my intervention is the site of the Ruins of Huanchaca, a former silver foundry.

I put myself in the skin of the protagonist of the legend: the child, sole survivor, plays to ward off death by disguising himself as a skeleton. He was forced to bury his relatives - or rather the values that eventually caused them to perish. What’s buried in the fridges are seemingly outdated parental values: creative poetic romanticism, the direct and

linear link between work and wage, the idea of keeping domestic animals (which in case of famine might quickly feed on us), the blind and thoughtless tourism.

The surviving child gathers in front of the graves and offers them a drink from the precious few bottles of soda that are left. He’s sowing what seems to be the remains of the economy, hoping to bring back abundance: he’s throwing chocolate coins around. The slightest noise or movement makes him run away and hide in his fridge.

In working towards my performance, I integrated the following objects:

-a piece of fichas - a rubber coin that was used to pay miners, and was an effective way to enslave them through a restricted circuit of the economy. They can still be found at the small port of Antofagasta for 3.000 pesos each.

-3-liter bottles of soda that are cheaper than water. In the shops, you can contract localized credit. Everything is privatized in Chile, and hence debt is omnipresent.

-artificial flowers: they are widely found in Chinese shops, and they are used to decorate the graves of animals, and animitas - small temples to honor the victims of road accidents.

-low-value coins, and chocolate coins wrapped in bad imitations of euros.

-an overall in white leather, a piece of workman’s clothing that I found at the flea market.