Cuban-born artist and designer Ernesto Oroza is a collector of artifacts. These artifacts are rare, but they aren't products of ancient history, and they aren't expert-made. Rather, they are the stuff of everyday Cuban life, doubly remarkable in their genius and simplicity: old aluminum lunch trays fashioned into radio antennas; a motor, harvested from a broken washing machine and welded to power a makeshift key-cutter; an irrigation system consisting of old soda bottles nourishing an urban farm of organic produce. Oroza travelled all over Cuba collecting these objects between 1994 and 2007, during the height of what Fidel Castro dubbed "The Special Period in a Time of Peace." Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba lost close to 75% of its international trade and the economy plummeted. Faced with severe austerity measures and dwindling resources, Cubans had to get creative to make do. And they did: the perfect storm of material scarcity brought on by the Special Period, and a ubiquitous, free education system distributed through socialist policy merged to spawn remarkable ingenuity in the everyday.
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