Neighbours. Day Two
Settlements
Ricardo Alcaide (Venezuela)
ricardoalcaide.com
abstractioninaction.com/ricardo-alcaide/
Living and working in Sao Paulo for the last years, after more than a decade in London, and previously in my hometown Caracas is an experience that still informs my practice and has been strongly influenced by architects like Gio Ponti, Carlos Raul Villanueva and Lina Bo Bardi, for example, who projected a great spirit of forward thinking and an extraordinary sense of aesthetics, -something that I cannot avoid to express myself. Latin-American architecture, or even generally speaking, is not only as a reference for my work but also as a way of living, a day by day personal exchange that affects the way I think, I function and interact with the world.
The work for his current solo show in Miami at Alejandra Von Hartz proposes a dialogue between all these concerns -the balance between formal aesthetics of modernism and the utopian impossibility- captured within the combination of found objects and the abstraction out from them, as in the Settlements installation, a construction built out of found disposed objects, next to a display of a small group of bronze sculptures of crushed cardboard boxes and other rejected material. Excerpt from his current exhibition, Displacement: The act of displacing, or the state of being displaced; a putting out of place.
La Menagerie
Stefan Paul Sauter (Costa Rica)
lamenagerie.squarespace.com
For years, the main mechanism used to advance the architectural discourse has been the manifiesto. However, due to the disappearance of a heroic image of the architect heightened by the global crisis of 2008 and the infinity of information provided by contemporary media, postulating a manifiesto proves to be a challenge for new generations. How then does a new generation of architects advance the discourse when the manifesto has lost its power? The noun “monster ” comes from monstrare, (to show) and monere (to warn). Just like manifestos, monsters mark the boundaries of cultural value. Beyond fascinating, frightening and attracting our attention, the importance of the monster as manifesto is used metaphorically to give explanation to the unknown and to establish a controversial shout to advance a social or moral point of view.
This research is not intended to demonstrate that a monstrous architecture exists but instead it is aimed at the generation of an alternative vocabulary that can reveal relationships in architecture not previously considered. If monsters are postulated as a reverse reflection of the cultural values of the time, the current fears in this tropical city have much to do with the disappearance of public space and the simplified solution to the problem of urban insecurity with razor wire, electric fences and steel mesh. Rather than speaking in defense of architecture, the city of San José speaks of an architecture of defense.
Mil M2
María Constanza Carvajal, Diego Cortés, María José
Jaña,
Fernando Portal, Pedro Sepúlveda (Chile)
milm2.cl
Photo: Proyecto Pregunta.Presentación de preguntas, Bilbao 511
Mil M2 (one thousand square meters) is an interdisciplinary team focused on the temporary use of empty infrastructure in Santiago de Chile. We seek to activate communities and territories through the collective generation of content.
Proyecto Pendiente is our second temporary use project. After the demolition of our first space – a Centre for Civic Engagement and Innovation – Proyecto Pendiente involves the refurbishing and programming of a site specific gallery in the upper plateau of Teatro Italia, a formerly social cinema built in 1934. This proyect will bring new uses to this space, between October 2014 and January 2017.