Neighbours. Day four
Brutalismo
Marlon de Azambuja (Brasil)
marlondeazambuja.com
Brutalism is an exercise in architectural thinking. Firstly, all the
elements used are temporarily suspended by industrial instrumentation
and are so because construction is not only matter at rest. When one
builds, one lifts a house, raises a building. Then the building
materials used are exposed as they are, without metaphors, without
finding them a role beyond their own presence and nakedness, because
ultimately this work seeks to deal with that, to carry out, in the
most radical and poetic way, the idea of brutalism. Accepting the
nature of materials and lifting a city.
NuMu
Jessica Kairé and Stefan Benchoam (Guatemala)
elnuevomuseo.org
NuMu (Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo) is Guatemala’s first Contemporary Art Museum, located in Guatemala City. Its physical space measures approximately 2 x 2.5 meters and has the shape of an egg as it was originally designed as an egg selling kiosk. It exhibits four shows per season, all of which are complemented by educational activities, and is open to the public 24 hours, 365 days a year and free to the public. NuMu is a project co-founded and co-directed by Jessica Kairé and Stefan Benchoam.
La Vorágine
Darién Montañez (Panamá)
darienmontanez.com
Shopping malls have completely usurped the role of public space in Panama City, and now you go to the mall to stroll and socialize and eat and go to the movies, always within the unchanging, secure confines of these climate-controlled spaces. This video illustrates and documents, like an anthropological study, the life of the inhabitants of the fancy section of the largest shopping mall in all of the Western Hemisphere: Panama’s Albrook Mall. Here, the shoppers move as in a trance, loaded with the paraphernalia of bags and cellphones, afloat in an endless sea of white. It is a study in contrasts: mortal and ephemeral subjects tread on the most permanent of materials—marble—within the most permanent of institutions—shopping.
La Vía Histórica
Edgardo Larregui (Puerto Rico)
larreguiarte.com
Illuminated lineal drawing of the old railroad tracks of the train. 252 colored bulbs draw lines representing the railroad tracks of the no longer existent train on the Island of Puerto Rico. In the early days of industrialization on the island, the workshop station for the trains occupied the same terrain where these two apartment towers are now found, For this reason, the name of the neighborhood is “Trastalleres” or “behind the workshops”. This is the same neighborhood where my grandparents raised my father and his three siblings, where the Puerto Rican singer, Andy Montañez, grew up, as well as other musicians, athletes and people worthy of admiration.
Tribute to the pioneer of this type of art and technology Frank J. Malina and inspired by the “enlightened” Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Mario Merz, Mauritius Nannuchi, James Turrell, Olafur Elliasson, Gozalez Felix Torrez.