Can a toy embody our history? What does its materiality, which is manufactured, advertised, collected, and entangled in games, have to say to us?

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Escala 1:43 opens a dialogue between our political history and a selection of toys produced or commercialized in Argentina in the last century. It also invites us to explore the presence of these objects in contemporary artistic artifacts. Toys – those things we interact with from a very young age – comprise a non-linear journey that reveals vital areas of our material culture. Far from offering a nostalgic or melancholic perspective on the lost world of childhood, here toys are both playful objects and a fundamental part of cultural heritage: historical documents, icons of the times, devices of fiction.

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“If we survey the entire history of toys,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “it becomes evident that the question of size has far greater importance than might have been supposed.” Giorgio Agamben also noted that toys, dating back to the spheres of the sacred and the practical-economic, invite us to rethink our relationship with time through the process of miniaturization of everyday objects. The exhibition, therefore, is organized around the idea of scale, taking its title from the proportions of one of the pieces on display: a miniature Ford Falcon from the national manufacturer Buby, which was popular in the 1970s. These scale model cars were sold in Argentine toy stores at the same time as the car itself became a symbol of dictatorial actions and of an automobile company that in its advertisements urged to “keep the country on the move”.

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The exhibition opens with a section of building blocks and games from the 1940s and 1950s. This area traces a dialogue between the pedagogical theories of the 19th century, the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century and the toys distributed during the Peronist era. The tour continues with a space dedicated to political violence, including pieces associated with events that occurred during the dictatorship: the 100th anniversary celebration of the so-called “Conquest of the Desert”, toys connected to Malvinas, and the war turned into a board game. The following section highlights how certain toys encapsulate two different worlds to depict the sexual division of labor: future male workers and future housewives. Other works display scenarios inhabited by gloomy spirits: babies, dolls, and scale figures evoke the traumatic and the sinister through specters, doubles, and missing persons. Some final images recall the atmosphere of the 1990s and beyond: a peculiar end-of-party mood, a sense of the force of neoliberal policies of consumption and exclusion, and the idea

of art as a sheltered space for collective encounters.

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By bringing together heterogeneous objects and artefacts, Escala 1:43 invites us to pay attention to the trajectories of Argentine toys, to the agency of their materiality and their recurrence in contemporary visual productions. In short, as Bruno Latour suggests, things produce things, and have concrete effects on the world.

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Curators: Jordana Blejmar, Natalia Fortuny and Martín Legón

Research Assistant: Erika Teichert

Consultant: Daniela Pelegrinelli

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The exhibition will be on display until 6th November 2022 at the Parque de la Memoria (Av. Costanera Rafael Obligado 6745) in Buenos Aires. 

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Download the exhibition flyer here.