A Shopping Cart to Heaven

An ordinary shopping cart has a mirror facing the sky. A man pushes the cart in the city. Two men take photographs of the reflections on the mirror. This is “Un Carrito al Cielo” (a shopping cart to heaven) a performance which gave these three Uruguayan artists the chance to participate in New York Art Bienal.

In 2008 Ernesto Rizzo created a ready-made piece of art. This is an object we use every day with an artistic objective. He added a mirror as a lid to a shopping cart. This is how “Carrito al Cielo” was born.

When the photographer Federico Meneses heard about this, he and his colleague Gerardo Carella convinced Ernesto Rizzo to do performances around the city.

So they went out to the streets: Ernesto pushes the cart while Gerardo and Federico take pictures.

The best way to show the photos is to exhibit them in the same places where they were taken in a horizontal form. The first reaction from the people is thinking that the photos are upside down and turn their heads. But once they see the cart they understand it better and even take pictures themselves. This means that the art goes to the people and not the other way around.

The shopping cart represents the consumer society which fills up with everything around it as it goes around the city. The objective of this performance is to show the city from a different point of view and in a different context giving the viewer the opportunity to completely rediscover spaces they know.

This performance will appear in New York next year.

Source: Revista Sala de Espera