Periods of profound social transformation often prompt a renewed engagement with the past. This tendency may take different forms, as the narratives through which the past is interpreted contribute to the formation of collective desires.
Growing up in post-GDR Berlin and witnessing the transformation of the urban and social landscape after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leo Elia’s recent artistic work has revolved around questions of post-socialism and post-socialist futurity. In his childhood, he read Alexander Volkov’s The Wizard of the Emerald City, a 1939 Soviet interpretation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Baum’s original text has been interpreted as a political allegory reflecting the social and economic debates of turn-of-the-century America, in which the Scarecrow symbolizes the farmer, the Tin Man the industrial worker, and the Cowardly Lion the politician, within a society grappling with class inequality, social mobility, and the question of bimetallism.
The Soviet adaptation offers an unlikely piece of cultural history, as the story could easily have been dismissed as imperialist American propaganda, yet significant elements of the American classic appear to have aligned with Stalinist ideology. Dorothy, renamed Ellie, still comes from Kansas. This act of cultural translation raises a broader question that runs through Elia’s work: what happens when stories or cultural symbols are transferred from one historical and political context into another? Argued by Miron Petrovsky, read between the lines, the Soviet version uses children’s literature as a veil for ideological reflection and can be understood as a subtle critique of Stalinist authoritarian rule.
Coppice & Pollard is the second installment in Leo Elia’s Companions Cycle, which explores the iconic characters of The Wizard of Oz. The cycle implicitly renders The Wizard of Oz as central to the canon of post-industrial storytelling and attempts to artificially replicate the gesture of the Soviet translation by asking what such a translation might look like today. Using his signature semi-animatronic style, Elia dedicates this new chapter to the Tin Man, focusing on his role as a lumberjack while investigating the propagandistic tendencies of both the Soviet translation and the 1900 original, and continuing his examination of the Cold War’s lingering cultural afterlife, shaped by nostalgia and authoritarianism.
At the center of his cycle Workers’ Monument (2026) stands a large-scale sculpture embodying the solitary monologue of the Tin Man before Dorothy and the Scarecrow discover him rusting in the forest. As tin does not rust, the Soviet translation transforms the character into an iron lumberjack. The sculpture presents three successive versions of the Tin Man emerging from within one another: a formal solution referencing a logging technique in which trees are cut in a way that encourages new shoots to grow, giving the overall cycle its name, Coppice & Pollard. The Soviet iron lumberjack breaks out of the shell of the original Tin Man. From within the Soviet figure, a third, more skeletal and robotic version emerges, with LED screens in place of eyes and singing a workers’ chanson in a heavily auto-tuned voice. Each earlier body remains behind as an empty shell, oxidizing over time.
Inspired by the iconography and stylistic solutions of socialist realism and Soviet memorial sites across East Germany, the artwork erects a never-existing monument to the ideal man of that time: a woodworker or industrial worker working toward his own obsolescence as metallurgy contributes to the decline of the logging industry. The chanson circles around questions of labor, inheritance, agency, and obsolescence, as the robot compulsively interrogates the material he is made of, searching for an answer to what he has become. At the same time, it conjures the worker as the central political subject of twentieth-century politics at a moment when twentieth-century political rhetoric is resurfacing, while the worker as a political subject itself has largely disappeared, pointing towards the structural conditions of automation and materialism.
As the contemporary AI race echoes the rhetoric of the Cold War, with technological competition once again shaping competing visions of the future, AI also functions as a system that responds to increasingly fragmented individual desires, at a moment when older forms of collective meaning-making have become largely unstable. Rather than demonizing AI, Elia’s work perhaps seeks to suggest that the stories through which we understand the present may themselves need to be revised in order to make sense of this moment.
Text by Lili Rebeka Tóth