Nombre: Royal Anthropological Institute: Art, Materiality and Representation
Categoría: Congreso
Lugar: Londres – British Museum/SOAS
Fechas: 01 junio – 03 junio
Participación: Ponencia

Feliz de participar en el panel  (P086) A Museum of Architecture: Challenging Representation(s), comisariado por Rachel Harkness, Ester Gisbert y Camille Sineau. Una gran ocasión para mostrar la pajarera de EDOM en un contexto diferente.

My paper discussed the role of representation in the material transformations conducted to convert two derelict low-income houses located in a small Mediterranean village into a contemporary videoart museum. But the aim of the project was not only to give life to a new museum, seen as an activity detached from Blanca’s daily routines. On the contrary, the arrival of video art in Blanca must be understood as an opportunity to alter through the use of technologies the meanings of popular dwellings, contemporary art, local communities and domesticities.

The intervention consists of small gestures that overlap with the existing atmosphere, activating a desirable complicity between the visitor, the building and the works of video art. We started with small material changes resulting from adapting the new program to alter usual meanings, to generate ambiguity and to destabilize the predictable. Colors, cracks, odors, damage, facilities… all are possibilities that act in a positive and affirmative way. We tried to think of seduction as a break in the foreseeable logic to generate attraction, complicity and acceptance. Thus we displayed methacrylate artifacts produced by digital manufacturing and assembled on IKEA structures, electrical wires mounted on fluorescent insulators, fluorescent tattoos painted on walls and ceilings that extend the configuration of existing flooring, esparto furniture produced by the esparto women workers, etc. As a result, the works of art are inserted in spaces mediated by technologies that refer the viewer to complex sensitive experiences, where the combination of parody, memory, play and sound pushes the user to the limits of clear understanding of works of art.