Liz Cohen, Trabantimino
For her Creative Capital-supported project, Bodywork, Liz Cohen (2005 Visual Arts) took two cars—an East German Trabant and a Chevy El Camino—and transformed them over the course of eight years into a hybrid: the Trabantimino. Liz presented this project in the Creative Capital session, Art at the Edge, at the 2012 IdeaFestival in Louisville. Our friends at IdeaFestival recently shared this video of Liz talking about how the ambitious project came to fruition.
As Liz explains in the video, Bodywork is essentially a project about transformation and hybrid identities. She says, “Cars can have so much to do with people’s identities, and national identity. For example, the Trabant and the El Camino both embody the values of the two countries that they come from. I thought that was a nice foil for what could happen to a person who is going from one country to another, or from one job to another job, or is marginalized in any way from the mainstream.”