The space between things

by Pablo Chiuminatto

LIGA 15: Emilio Marín + Juan Carlos López (Chile). The Space Between Things
Photography: Luis Gallardo

 

To picture a sequence of spaces in the mind’s eye is to build, perhaps even to compose. Marín + López propose a space and lay out other spaces within it, an ordered arrangement. A cabinet of prisms, miniature reserves of memory. In a trope not unlike the ideas put forward by Georges Perec in Species of Spaces (1974) –or even taking their cue from Perec– Marín + López project a theater of objects. At the same time, each one of these volumes originates in a different space, the designed space. A painstaking taxonomy of apparently basic forms; each of which is a physical projection of an architectural projection. A still life of a city, like a painting by Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), is the imaginary classification of modeled ideas displayed in multiple, regular layers. Diminutive machines of meaning ordered with the precision of a careful giant, in the child’s science of the distance between objects.

Thus, like so many other volumes of domestic life, this ordering brings together objects in order to convert them into something else. A factory of representation that Marín + López set to work in each project. Families of objects, the memory of completed projects. Establishing a dialogue with these individual elements displayed on the shelves, a diorama recalls the series of paintings produced by Marianne North (1830-1890) during her visit to Chile in 1884.[1] They are likewise a scale solution, but of the landscape, the territory. Of the almost 900 native species the English traveler painted during her journey around the world, this diorama presents the plant known as the Puya (puya chilensis) found in central Chile (Hoffman, 254). This species had long fascinated travelers and today its flowering spikes are to be seen rising on the coastal mountains and the Andes. The flower is usually yellow, resembling a flaming torch. Rarely, it is blue, a different kind of fire. The landscape is located within a vault, intentionally finite. Once again the exercise requires miniaturization in order to imagine. The diorama builds the natural space within the designed space.

The relationship within the exhibition space –like that between all the architecture projects of Marín + López with regard to the landscape– is the result of the dialogue with the scale forms. What is small is inverted monumentality, what is enormous is but a detail in the immensity of the natural world, while the medium-sized crosses the axes to reverse the infinite and make it habitable. Solid and void combined.

In Chile Marín + López’s projects establish this dialogue of sizes. Another version of the hidden geometry of geographical masses. The mountains of the Andes range are large in comparison to the valley, but are nothing when compared to the immensity of the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, buildings are little more than microscopic advances made by diminutive prisms on the vastness of the Earth, rain-washed crystals.

Architecture should contain –paradoxically– the energy of the land in movement. We know that the planet moves, but in places like Chile or Mexico, the earth moves too. What is supposed to be fixed, the primary element, trembles like water. Earthquakes turn buildings into ships. To construct amidst this geography means designing every object to withstand such a voyage. Each one seeks to safeguard the little thing it carries with it. Thus, such objects –these comments on memory– are sometimes the hyperbole of meaning. Simple remnants may be all that remain on dry land of a shipwreck. These shelves gather the flotsam of the positive and continual shipwreck of ideas, a crystallized form of survival, extolled in the order and narrative they nourish.

Dimensions and functions, objects and uses, design and context: these are the coordinates that determine the projection of this journey, as well as the voyage on dry land of these strange ships, architectural concretions on the plane of the real. A challenge to the double enigma of the order of the magnitudes, from the infinitesimal to the immense.

Bibliography

Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and other Pieces. London: Penguin, 1999.

Hoffmann, Adriana. Flora Silvestre De Chile, Zona Central. Santiago: Fundación Claudio Gay, 1998.

[1] Painting 026: The Blue Puya and Cactus at home in the Cordilleras, near Apoquindo, Chili (1884-1885). The botanical painting collection of Marianne North is located in Kew Gardens, London.

 

 

LIGA 15: Emilio Marín + Juan Carlos López (Chl)