The Museo Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires/Fundación Constantini, in collaboration with the artist and his study, and the car tire company Fate, presented for the first time in the country an artistic and social initiative titled La democracia del símbolo, a site-specific work by Leandro Erlich (Buenos Aires, 1973), which takes Buenos Aires iconic Obelisk as the central axis for a monumental public art project. The work has two parts. First, at the site of the Obelisk, the artist intervenes the monument directly, making its apex disappear; then, the apex reappears in the esplanade of MALBA, via a life-scale reproduction. In this way, the audience is able to enter it and enjoy the four aerial views of a monument so central to the Argentine imagination. Through this artistic intervention, Leandro Erlich gives us the opportunity to visit the Obelisk's interior and discover its aerial view for the first time since it was created in 1936, in this way democratizing access and making it a true public monument, open to all. "I am interested in generating projects in which art escapes the boundaries of conventional exhibition centers and braids itself into the order of the quotidian", Erlich explains. "I am interested in art as an instrument for integration, action, connection. The relationship between a city and its monuments, what it means to visit them, something that not only tourists do, has to do with appropriation, pride, and belonging. And in Argentina, the Obelisk is a monument that has never been intended to be visited", he adds. The Obelisk was built in 1936 by modernist architect Alberto Prebisch. Since then, it has become a gathering point, a site for celebrations, and the location for political rallies. It has also been the inspiration for many artistic projects by pioneering photographers like Grete Stern, Horacio Coppola—who registered its construction in film—Marta Minujín, and Leandro Katz, among many others. For more information, visit the MALBA web page at
www.malba.org.ar/leandro-erlich-la-democracia-del-simbolo