The El Camino Chia Pet: A Situationist Critque Of The Chiamino

When we hear the worlds "El Camino" and "growing labs" our mind makes a stop at Cheech & Chong before arriving at an agricultural reconceptualization of urban spaces. But the folks at Farmlab saw this junky G-body and immediately visualized this bizarre yet wonderful art project. We consider ourselves amateur psychogeographers, so we're going to look at this through the prism of unitary urbanism.

On a superficial level, an El Camino with plants growing on it is a reuse of space the provides a jolt to our psyche through the destruction of our expectations: a vehicle is a mechanical object that moves us through our urban space and is made of metals, whereas plants are immobile and organic. But if that were the only statement this object was making, if it were but a simple dichotomy, we wouldn't be impressed.

What makes the object uniquely suited to a psychogeographic statement is that the vehicle itself is the El Camino. Had it been a Taurus or a Chevelle it would have just been a car with plants on it. But an El Camino is a challenge to all our epistemological constructions. It's an American car with a spanish name. It's the cab of the car with the bed of a truck. The industrial revolution was man's victory over nature and yet, with this vehicle, it's the product of the industrial revolution being conquered by nature. That and a truck bed is a really good place to put soil. [Flickr via Winding Road]