Toy Architectures in Latin America

Co-Sponsored by Advancing Interdisciplinary Memory Studies @ NTU and the Memory Studies Research Group in the Centre for Research in History, Heritage and Memory Studies in Nottingham Trent's School of Arts and Humanities:

Please join us on May 9, 3 PM for Dr Jordana Blejmar's talk on "Toy Architectures: Building Blocks and the (Re)Construction of Latin America"

Location: NTU City Campus, Dryden Building Room 001 - coffee & tea will be provided

Note: this is a free in-person only event, but please register for catering purposes. Should you have problems accessing in-person, please email [email protected]

MORE INFORMATION:

The Speaker

Jordana Blejmar is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Arts at the University of Liverpool. She studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires and received her doctorate at the University of Cambridge as a Gates scholar. She is author of Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and co-editor of three books on art and politics in Latin America. She has curated art and photography exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and Paris. She is currently leading the research project "Cold War Toys: Material Cultures of Childhood in Argentina" (2022-2024), sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The Talk

In the early years of the nineteenth century, German crystallographer and pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel (1782-1852) incorporated building blocks in his revolutionary programme for teaching art, mathematics, and natural history known as kindergarten. Constructive play, he believed, was fundamental for developing children’s natural architectonic impulses, and blocks (or ‘gifts’ as he called them) could be used in structures that imitated forms found both in nature and in everyday life (buildings, vehicles, etc.). More recently, building blocks were at the centre of a new ‘argumentative turn’ in art and architecture history when, in 1997, US scholar, Norman Brosterman suggested that to understand the spirit as well as the formal qualities of the avant-garde aesthetics of the early 20th Century we should take into account the early educational years of artists and architects such as Klee, Kandinsky, Le Corbusier and Lloyd Wright, who all attended kindergartens.

In Latin America, building blocks inspired the work of avant-garde artists such as Xul Solar (1887-1963, Argentina) and Joaquín Torres-García (1874-1949, Uruguay). On this occasion, however, I will discuss another (political) meaning that constructive play acquired during the Cold War in the region, when it was promoted as a way of training the future architects and engineers of a new socialist and populist era. Including close readings of the play scripts, promotional material, industrial history, and affective narratives attached to these sets, this paper will explore the links between children’s construction toys and the utopian imagination. I will focus in particular on El constructor infantile (privilegiado) [The privileged child builder] and Mejor decir es hacer [Better than saying is doing], both distributed by the Eva Perón Foundation in Argentina, and play sets of Soviet architecture models, including El futuro arquitecto [The Future Architect], which were sold in Chile during Salvador Allende’s government.

Photo credit: Florencia Cosin. Mejor que decir es hacer [Better than saying is doing], toy distributed by the Eva Peron Foundation c. 1950 (manufacturer unknown), from the Cold War Toys project Collection (AHRC/University of Liverpool).

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Dryden Street, Dryden Street, Nottingham, United Kingdom