CEP Hotpress

About 2 weeks before arriving in Buenos Aires, we arranged with Carlos Levinton to move the hotpress from INTI, where it had languished this past year, to his Center for Experimental Production (CEP) at the University of Bs.As. We wanted to maximize the short time we had here and work with Carlos’ group to begin making composite products that could have a market or use value for the cartoneros. The lack of a product has been the black hole of our project, and though Caroline’s students at Queens University have come up with some ingenious designs and small prototypes of a chair, table, and a set of venetian blinds, it was important to create full-size objects with the hotpress here. Yesterday, we worked with University electricians and Tomas Benasso (the industrial designer who built the press last year) to bring it back online. It was a struggle, with too many boring details, but the picture above illustrates some of the dangerous hoops we (they) had to pass through to get it working again.