Press Release for Leo Elia’s solo show at aaaaNordhavn, Copenhagen, 17.10 – 07.11.25.

[Welcome dear audience to the funerary home aaaa nordhavn. Tonight, we gather to commemorate the entangled histories of the pre-, post-, and Cold War eras across the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Please come closer, and just as if you were in a cinema, enjoy the open casket revealing the bodies of the three Scarecrows sewn together — embodiments of old times, fallen regimes, and promising new worlds. There is no need to be horrified; they may not be dead, only lying amidst the delusion of a poppy-flower meadow, dreaming that once they rise, the dreamworlds of capitalism will finally come true. And now, listen — they have a story to tell you…]

In 1900, upon publishing the first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and in clear opposition to the old literary trend of seeking “to point a fearsome moral to each tale,” L. Frank Baum wrote that “modern education includes morals, therefore (…) ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ was written solely to please the children of today.” In 1939 — the same year MGM released its Technicolor film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, which now constitutes the canon of early children’s cinema — the Soviet writer Alexander Volkov translated Baum’s novel into Russian. His version, The Wizard of the Emerald City, gives particular attention to the Scarecrow character, renamed Strachila, who attempts to govern the Magic Land. While Baum’s original text has often been interpreted as a political allegory reflecting the social and economic debates of turn-of-the-century America — in which the Scarecrow symbolizes American farmers within a society grappling with class inequality, social mobility, and the question of bimetallism — the Soviet version, read between the lines, uses children’s literature as a veil for ideological reflection. Strachila’s portrayal, in this context, can be understood as a subtle critique of Stalinist authoritarian rule.

Growing up in post-GDR Berlin and witnessing the transformation of the urban landscape after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Elia had read The Wizard of the Emerald City. His project, The Scarecrows of Saskan, unfolds as a fictional rehearsal stage encased in a crystal coffin. Drawing on projection techniques borrowed from Disney theme park animatronics, the sculpture comes to life: the stitched faces sing and speak in sync with the musical’s dialogue to tell an alternative story of The Wizard of Oz, for which Elia invents a third Scarecrow — Buddy Bale — one who is elusive, opportunistic, and who already knew the prior two characters.

Written, staged, and performed by Elia as a one-person project, The Scarecrows of Saskan can be read as an autobiographical portrayal of an artist whose upbringing relates to the post-1989 world, who received his education in the West, and who is fascinated by the themes of the “uneven landscape of modernization” and reflective nostalgia that cherishes ambivalence, and fosters irony.

Returning to an era of modernism, Elia critiques the German restorative, nationalistic agenda in its relation to the ruins of the past. Designed using the symbols of American modernist consumerist utopia — the Art Deco style — the Crystal Coffin (2025) becomes, in Groysian terms, an “aestheticized material corpse”; the exhibited artifact which, in the daylight of the museum, “functions as a testimony to the impossibility of resurrection.”

What Elia does is activate the modernist past not as an object of nostalgia but as a speculative tool — through a language they call alternative timeline Pop Art, he transforms the ruins of utopia into a site for reimagining collective futurity, where irony and desire coexist in the same frame.

Lili Rebeka Tóth

Photos: Morton Underbjerg. Courtesy of aaaaNordhavn.