A Thematic City That Borders On The Absurd
Aleix Plademunt Perez: My work reflects on different social attitudes, analyzed through the landscape. I am interested in the landscape when it has a direct relationship with the social, with us. I’m interested in analyzing the landscape from a present perspective, from the moment of history in which I am living. I’m questioning why I have found the landscape in this way, how we use it, how we move about in it, and what we understand by the term ‘landscape’. Dubai has had the privilege of being able to create a city from scratch, from nothing. The city has the space and money to enable it to realize the dreams of a society. The city speaks of the desires, hopes and habits of today’s society. A city was built by appropriating Western symbols and taking them to the extreme, to the limit. The result is a thematic and fictionalized city which in many cases borders on the absurd.
Selected by Marta Daho on July 19, 2010
A Place Where You Can’t Say No
Acapulco is a place where you can’t say no. Elvis Presley said it this way in a song dating back to 1963 that had become popular a year earlier after the release of the movie Fun in Acapulco. In this installation project, the Mexican artist Pablo López Luz not only sheds light upon the topographic vision of different architectural structures and urban landscape but also to the classical imagery of a place full of glamour that has been vividly immortalized by the cinema and advertising industries.
Selected by Marta Daho on July 15, 2010
The UK Pavilion Has Sixty Thousand Spikes
The UK pavilion has sixty thousand spikes made by fiber optics, it is also called the “Seed Cathedral,” each fiber optic ends in a room where a large number of different kinds of seeds can be seen embedded at the end of each spike. On the outside, the fibers create a gently moving effect, at night the light is diffuse and of various colors.
Selected by Regina Anzenberger on May 7, 2010
A City, Eclectic As Much As Electric
In her series “Transformer,” Sevim Sancaktar takes close-ups of the wall illusions painted on electrical transformers throughout Istanbul and some surrounding cities. A representation of their time as well as a deformed reflection of urban history, architectural element as much as artistic expression, these images form a social and cultural portrait of the town; A city, eclectic as much as electric, that merges the occidental with the oriental, the classical with the contemporary, thus creating a utopical anachronism. Playing on the deceptive and aesthetic function of her subject, the photographer creates a new illusion by taking away from reality its three-dimensional essence.
Selected by Sinem Yoruk on April 27, 2010
The Reality We Are Not Yet Determined To Accept
[The architect] Salomone’s work is a monumental and wonderfully creative expression of a style in which Art Deco and Rationalism merge. In my view, and analyzing it from the perspective given by the current situation, his task as official architect shows the failure of a country’s project. Although Fresco’s management was quite successful, behind his ambitious urban program, the failure of the rich agricultural and farming Argentina utopia became apparent once again. And this failure broadens the gap between that fiction we still believe in, and the reality we are not yet determined to accept.
Selected by Marcelo Brodsky on January 26, 2010
Cracks In Plaster Like Wrinkles In A Face
After the absurdity and the violence, what is left behind? How many of the different aberrations in Argentina’s recent political history can be interpreted in the cracks of the architecture surviving the protagonists? With these concerns as a premise, and rooted in my in my interest for the representation of absence, space and histories, I decided to work with the appearance of certain buildings and monuments.
Selected by Marcelo Brodsky on January 24, 2010
A Metaphor Of Idleness, Ambiguity And Disruption
The work presented here is a series of photographs of abandoned houses in Anahuac, on the north of Mexico. I have lit up the houses at night, as if they were monuments, marking its sculpture characteristics making a theatrical view of the human drama lived there. I analyze through photography their aesthetic categories and their qualities as documents and ruins. In this work I was interested in portraying a disappearing way of life through these images, and how that impacted the use of land. One of the houses was of the sister of my grandfather. The people had to flew to other areas after a drought of several years, that made impossible to keep working the fields
Selected by Juan Antonio Molina Cuesta on December 13, 2009
