Description of project by Conjuntos Empáticos
We find it difficult to define a position in a context that we all hope will be transitional, although somehow we sense that it will mean a change in our lives; we do not know if clinically, materially, procedurally or socially. This is superimposed on the fact that our own understanding evolves as the months go by, so that the approach with which we won this curatorial in September 2020 would not seem to be able to be the same that we explain today, in March 2021, or the one that it is exposed in May of this same year. And yet, as good beings of habit, our hope is that life will once again be similar to how it was before this pandemic.
We understand that, at present, architecture must be interpreted as a social situation, as a mediator or interface between cultural and social reality. For this reason, Past-present for an affective context proposes an expository circumstance in which eleven pieces are included that have more to do with the interactions they cause than with their physical materialization. The focus is not so much on the objects as on the discourses and dynamics they represent. This set somehow speaks of notions of our pandemic moment, among which we could highlight self-conception, recycling, technoarchitecture, free occupation and the questioning of everything that was and is being.
This collection of objects aims to make visible artifacts created in the past - be it more distant or more immediate - that must now be more present than ever, since they highlight an instant of our pandemic reality, with multiple themes on the table that they describe a context, in our understanding complex, that is capable of dealing with concepts as diverse as racism towards the people who generated the virus; fear of the people who wear it; the need for protection; the development of tools with which to cope with the day to day; the fight to survive; the global pandemic; the dream of a different future; the appropriation of public space; the social control to which we are subjected in our different countries; the environmental change that we suffer from our excesses as a community; the psychological effects of deprivation of physical contact; the stresses produced by the insulation; the total virtualization of our communications; the distance generated between the individual and society; the viralization of knowledge; the open source structures that allow us to share; living together without social interaction; the commitment to ecological materials; fun as an escape route; trust as a utopian feeling; understanding an exceptional situation; the spatial conception as understanding of the context; the corporal conception as assimilation of the individual; the digital space as our new mother territory; minor architecture as that which is closely related to people; the prosthesis as a second body capable of extending physical power; reality as a situation of hypertechnification; experience through heightened perception; the absent body as the new materiality of the human being; being situated as the negation of one's own point of view; perception as the mechanism of phenomenological affirmation; the meta-observation that enables the self-construction of the subject; the continuous reflection resulting from our digital life; the self-conception learned from our interactions; incorporeity in a fluid reality; the environment as a refuge; nature worthy of mimicry to survive; pollution imbricated with everyday life; learning about the adaptive capacity of other species; the house as an envelope; the dissolved boundaries between body, costume and architecture; body architecture as the first layer of protection; the material manipulation for the creation of new spaces; body movement as a new dimension of the environment; natural and artificial surpluses as construction materials; biological manufacturing as a production technique; transformation as true recycling; efficient solutions that can be manual or technological; the biomaterial as the basis for the generation of its own nature; the new material culture that values what is but cannot be seen; the intimate space as an architectural minimum; recycling as a thought process; topography as an adaptive body environment; nature understood as a welcoming place; the prototype as a dialogue between design and industry; the place as a meeting; the contemporary landscape as the formation between nature and artifice; the hybridization of the object with space; collaboration between innovation and tradition; the grammar of landscape applied to public space; the dissolution of the boundaries between areas; social involvement as a cultural fact; the reinterpretation of artisan technologies; understanding of user action; the symbolic value of the elements that interact with the bodies; architecture as practice; the assemblages of the corporeal, the technological or the climatic; the generation of interdependence and connection between bodies; the ecosystem as the conformation of the human being; the body as an object of technification; the techno-social condition as posthuman thought; technological devices as generators of hosting protocols; enrollment as a political mission of technology; the forms of association generated by technology; the mediating functions of the devices; relational dynamics as a techno-social composition; exploration through architectural experiment; the certainty that we are techno-human; the stress tests to which the architecture is subjected; affection as a component of ontological systems; the situation of action and thought; ecology as an urgent need; the rhythms of nature in the human being; biodiversity as wealth; biology as a sensory experience; commensalism as a biological interaction; the naturalization of industry as a contemporary practice; security through a space control system; colonization agreements for freedom of action, the free occupation of organic space; the unwritten rules of movement and situation; the area of coexistence in the public environment; the reformulation of the interaction protocols; the trans-species scale as an agglutinator of real complexity; the zoonosis that favors the reconfiguration of the territorial dwelling; the changing situations in between; ease of disinfection; the technoarchitectonic as a necessity; the atmosphere as a conditioner of the place; the technification of development and results; productive-social uses as activators of forgotten architectures; the sound impact as an affecting of envelopes; programmatic adaptation as an architectural variable; architectural systems of mutable shape and size; the generating craft of elements with greater flexibility; the control of atmospheres, acoustics, spatial, light and tactile; the demanding program as an architectural parameter; the response and perception of the space to the requirements; overlap as a material benefit; the translation of atmospheric variables into physical parameters; human experience as a perceptual and sensory measure; human bipolarity as a fusion between violence and empathy; everyday life as a scene of castration; the amnesia of desire as a promoter of monotonous actions; the desexualized condition as a result of external imposition; affective despair as a non-accidental pathology; the organic psyche as the dematerialization of the human being; temporary anonymous zones as a reflection of the agenda that submits us; the boundaries between digital, robotic, biological and human substances; questioning the format and aesthetic conditions; the chance redefinition between object, situation and psyche; the intimacies-extremities that go through our scenes; the vulnerability of being due to the Anthropocene; the eco-machinist masochism in which we have been involved; software as an interpreter of building codes; architecture as a permanent artifact by way of intentional error; artificial intelligence as a construction tool; analog-digital data as new lines in the plane; and bio-mimicry as the new architecture.
The complexity of the relationships generated by these concepts forces us to place them in a specific and characterized exhibition environment that will allow their interpretation and understanding. The containing atmosphere represents a timeless and neutral environment that enables the selected pieces to be interpreted as mediating interfaces capable of qualifying a domestic scale situated at times more on the virtual plane than on the physical plane, both being inseparable. The imaginary generated in recent months presents us with a way of living not so far removed from situations reflected in futuristic films, having opened our perception of the intimate and giving way to the publicity of our bedroom routines. At present, we are aware of how our society coexists in its most intimate profile, which has been externalized by audiovisual means on social networks and the media. This has made us live in a state between the virtual and the physical, between the material and the biological, being the spoken and written word, clothing, furniture or architecture our enablers of new realities; those alternative realities that will allow us to generate external stimuli. And yet, all those artifacts that we have used to mediate this emergency situation were ancient and almost spoke to us of the precariousness in which we live. What would our reality have been like if we had made use of designs created in recent years and not objects whose ideological conception exceeds fifty?
The present sample builds an experience that accumulates different pandemic experiences, taking into account the artistic and cultural thinking that has developed in recent years. It is thus intended to vindicate the need to eliminate the existing dissociation between theoretical approaches and the reality in which society lives, denying that the exhibition atmosphere is a utopia on the way to dystopia, if not that it should come to be accepted in the context for the one that was created. Because, compared to living in a static space, it is necessary that our home allows us to experience different atmospheres with more complex fictions or, in other words, domestic environments made up of adulterated situations. This triggers a new scenario of affection with ourselves, with others and with our virtual environment.
This is our frozen image of the pandemic, intentionally adapted to our emotional needs, with interfaces capable of generating affective contexts or architectures.
