Caseros Prison Demolition Project

The Caseros Prison Demolition Project — 80,000 Tons, which contains 16 Tons and Aparecidos is the work of artist Seth Wulsin. It uses the defunct Caseros Prison of Buenos Aires, Argentina and its demolition as raw materials.

Aparecido is the past participle for the Spanish verb aparecer - to appear. Its second meaning is apparition or ghost. It may also refer in an oblique way to Argentina's Dirty War, in which an estimated 30,000 people, "Desaparecidos" were disappeared between 1976 and 1981 by the military junta, many of them thrown from airplanes into the Rio Plate.

Sixteen Tons, the name of a popular song written in the late 1940s, referred to the amount of coal a miner was expected to load in a day, but in this context may refer to the amount of glass broken out through the installation, or de-installation, process.

80,000 tons is the approximate weight of the entire building, and the debris that the demolition produced.

On a basic level, the demolition of the prison, contracted out by the city government of Buenos Aires to the Argentine military, was the seed for the artwork. The building was slated for demolition in 2001, but the process was subject to various legal, environmental and bureaucratic roadblocks. The original plan was to implode the building in three steps. But the implosion was stopped at the last minute by a group of neighbors concerned about the possibility of damaging environmental effects, including asbestos poisoning and the possibility of driving millions of rats out of the tunnels underneath the prison. Caseros was demolished by mechanical means floor by floor from the top down between 2003 and 2008. The cost of demolishing the prison, and thus the budget for the artwork, was estimated at somewhere between one and three million dollars.

The window grids on the north end of the former prison provided the and point of entry for the work. Each grid was approximately 17 feet (5.2 m) tall and 9 feet (2.7 m) wide. Breaking out certain windows, Wulsin created faces in each of the 48 outer grids on the building. Each grid consisted of 11 x 19 (209) circular semi-opaque windows, eight inches (203 mm) in diameter. The windows that remained reflected the light of the sky, the sun and the moon, producing images from certain angles that were completely a function of space and light—the dark interior space of the prison, and the light shining through the optically reflective space of the remaining windows.

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