LIGA 20: Nicolás Campodonico (Arg). Simultaneous Alternatives
Photography: Rafael Gamo
I set out to write about the intervention in a space with windows, and I end up surrendering myself to an elegy on the multiple and the simultaneous. A window is always an occasion for imagining a place of observation, a privileged point of view to see things outside of ourselves as a spectacle. It is an architectural element that enables us to grasp, from the position we are in, everything around us. Experienced in this way, the recognition of what is surprising about reality becomes the principal theme of the profession of architecture.
Carlos Emilio Gadda knew that in literature “to know is to insert something into reality, and thereby deforms reality.” Hence his typical mode of representation and the tension that he creates between himself and the things represented, so that the more the world is deformed beneath his gaze, the more he is committed to it.
Introducing into this space a mysterious object, a metal sheet that is folded, multiplied, and deformed, carrying back and forth the occasional images that are produced beyond is a simple—and thus an exciting—intuition. An ephemeral and singular mechanism for registering the fleetingness of life and experimenting with the stupor of elemental things.
The steel sheet alters existing relationships and presents itself spatially like an open encyclopedia—an adjective that without doubt contradicts the noun “encyclopedia,” whose etymological roots indicate its pretension to encompass the world’s knowledge, enclosing it in a circle—as a paradigm of a totality that can only be comprehended from a multiple perspective. Understanding the project of contemporary architecture as an encyclopedia means adopting it as a method of knowledge and exploration, but above all, as a network of connections between facts, between people, and between the things of the world.
Nicolás Campodonico appears to have understood that in our epoch more than in any other, for architecture the time has come to take charge of this ancient ambition to represent the multiplicity of relations, in action and in potential.
He thus chooses to express the tension between mathematical exactness and the approximation of human events by way of a type of controlled fluidity. He dreams the mathematics of a singular solution.
With this performance, in this act he presents us with a way of understanding the contemporary world as a system of systems in which each individual system conditions the others, and is conditioned by them.
In his works, the smallest part is conceived as the center of a network of relationships that the eye cannot help but follow, multiplying the details in such a way that they suggest infinite associations.
Unwittingly, it represents the world as a tangle, a thicket, or a ball of yarn. I know, by his own admission, that he does not follow the seduction of a form. As a result, this always arrives as the inevitable heart of the matter. It is the reason of a world that participates with elegance and discrete commitment, without attenuating in the least its inextricable complexity, or the simultaneous presence of the most diverse elements that come together to define this specific challenge.
