Liz Cohen: Trabantimino, 2002-12 / Pérez Art Museum Miami

As part of the group exhibition Xican-a.o.x. Body, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami features artist Liz Cohen’s artwork Trabantimino. It’s basically a lowrider version of a Trabant, a small car produced from 1957 until 1991 by former East German car manufacturer VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau, customized using General Motors parts and hydraulics. Liz Cohen was born in 1973 in Phoenix, Arizona, where she lives and works.

Liz Cohen: Trabantimino, 2002-12 / Pérez Art Museum Miami. December 6, 2024.

— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.

Exhibition text (excerpt, sources: PAMM, Liz Cohen website):
Although customizing automobiles may have long been perceived as a male-dominated pastime, Liz Cohen’s fascination developed in Phoenix, where she grew up witnessing and subsequently participating in lowrider culture. Cohen’s Trabantimino is also inspired by her Colombian heritage and her family’s relationship to Communism in that country. The ten-year process of transforming the small East German automobile into a hybrid sculpture that evokes the Chevrolet El Camino consisted of the artist learning mechanical engineering from mentors at Worldwide Customs, Oakland; Elwood Bodyworks, Scottsdale, Arizona; and Kustom Creations, Detroit. Trabantimino plays into larger questions of mixed identity and culture. Cohen posed with the car during and after her pregnancy while dressed like a lowrider model, offering an alternate vision of female sexuality, and blurring the line between fantasy and motherhood.

Xican-a.o.x. Body is the first major exhibition to showcase work by artists who foreground the body as a site of political agency and imagination, artistic investigation, decolonization, and alternative forms of community. The exhibition’s title is based on the term, Chicano, that is traditionally defined as an ethnic identity for Mexican Americans who embrace their indigenous ancestry. The exhibition emerges at the intersection of experimental artistic practices dating back to the Chicano Movement’s key years in the 1960s and 1970s and embraces the work of artists who identify in myriad ways—including Mexican American, Chicana/o, Xicanx, Indigenous, Latinx, Black, Brown, and Queer.

“For roughly a decade, I focused on the fabrication of a car. Originally a Trabant, the Trabantimino transforms into an El Camino through hydraulics in its expanding chassis. The wheel‐base expands 3 feet to the wheel‐base of the El Camino, and the rear of the car extends an additional 3 feet to match the length of a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino.

A series of events led me to purchase an East German Trabant in Berlin in 2002. The Trabant was produced in East Germany from 1959-1991 during the socialist era. It embodied the East German values of utility, simplicity and resourcefullness. It’s 2 stroke engine had only 7 moving parts and as fiberglass was unavailable, the cars panels were made with waste products mixed with resin—in the beginning shredded wool military uniforms and later paper waste.

I decided to bring it back to the US and turn it into an El Camino in order to become a fringe member of American custom car culture. If the Trabant was the utopian East German car, the El Camino was the utopian American car. Also produced during the Cold War period, the El Camino was the one stop shopping car—it had the speed of a muscle car, the comfort of a sedan, and the utility of a pick up truck. Like all things utopian, these cars also exposed the pitfalls of what is lost in translation from big idea to tangible product. The Trabants were stinky and slow. Although they were meant to be cheap to manufacture in the hopes that every East German would have one, people waited on lists for years in order to get one. As for the El Camino, you simply can’t have it all in one package. The car didn’t do any of the things it set out to do well. A full load in the flat bed of an early El Camino could crack its frame.

I used the hydraulic technology that is used in lowriders to power the transformation of the car. Lowriding is an immigrant subculture that blossomed during the same Cold War time period that the Trabant and the El Camino were manufactured. What I love about lowriding is that it started off as a culture of defiance. Rather than tune and perfect with the aim of hot rod speed. Lowriders were meant to go low, slow and clown or call attention. They were a display of creativity by a marginalized latino culture in East Los Angeles and around the southwest. The Trabant can never be an El Camino, but it can’t be a Trabant anymore either. Through the transition a space is created for a new vehicle. —The refusal to surrender to the impossible necessitates invention.”
(Liz Cohen)