Carapantallas (Billboards)
Interventions on billboards

Carapantallas  is a program of artistic interventions on the traditional billboards of Buenos Aires—called ‘carapantallas’ and used for the promotion of products (advertisements) or ideas (propaganda)—that seeks to activate these urban devices as spaces of experimentation within the ´ace studio, questioning their original function and displacing their communicational logic. In this environment of exploration, we invite artists, designers and researchers to intervene and work on the materialities, uses and discourses that these structures convey.

This program, which articulates the mnemonic power of the street with the processual experimentation of a residency and the possibilities of the workshop, hybridizes the practice of printmaking, painting, visual arts, installation, object media and urban intervention to generate new forms of inscription in the public and the private. It originates in the fortuitous encounter in a recycling container of two carapantallas that had been discarded for being in poor condition, which were restored and installed in ´ace’s studio to give them a new life as objects of analysis, rehearsal and production.

Just as PalimpsestProject—Mural Painting Residency (a program dedicated to the production and research on mural painting in relation to its architectural and urban context) has sought to intervene the wall as a surface in constant transformation, Carapantallas proposes an investigation on the carapantallas porteños, understood as contemporary palimpsests in which the ephemeral, the institutional and the spontaneous intertwine in a struggle for visibility and permanence.