LIGA 35: Infraestudio (Cub). In your mind
Photography: Arturo Arrieta
“Where there is architecture, nothing (else) is possible”.
Imagining Nothingness, Rem Koolhaas.
I.
I enrolled at the school of architecture in Havana to become a writer. I passed the admission test, which consisted primarily of drawing the corner of the workshop where we were being examined, and ever since, I believe this is the best method of being admitted into any fancied place. A bit Kafkaesque –though paperwork always is– and there is no compelling reason why one should not exchange a criminal record or a birth certificate for a life drawing sketched from a corner at the local law enforcement office. The choices would be either abiding to official procedures or producing a corner. This should not be mistaken for a method that only favors those born with an ability for freehand drawing; being good at freehand drawing is a patent talent but, by the same token, it is not enough. Because drawing a corner is not concerned with reality as much as it is with an individual desire to face an end. A few years after my sketches, Fernando Martirena and Anadis González drew their own corner and enrolled in the same school; in no time they also became writers. Their first book, El espacio del texto, signed by Infraestudio, and published by Ediciones Infraleves, contains procedures, quotes, lists, voices of characters narrating their encounters with buildings, actions (like the chronicle of how the last window in Casa Lamas was consumed, an update of “The burning of the Vignola” in Havana’s school of architecture during the mid-40s, when a group of students made an extracurricular bonfire with the design treatise of classical orders); their writing is characterized by the logic of daily life, with truths such as: «Building a concrete slab is the most anticipated celebration of Cuban self-construction», or «Nothing more difficult than to explain how something, which is wrong in principle, may be right». Their second published volume was a single-family house entitled Casa B and it is, at the very least, the best work that Cuban architecture has so far produced in this century.
II.
Museums make us read while standing up. We spend more time in front of the wall’s text than before any evidence of work. The exhibition by Infraestudio In your mind transforms the work-text imbalance into an opportunity. Viewers visit the LIGA gallery space to imagine other spaces through words. They come all the way here to get to other places. The only visible architecture is the Mexican gallery’s interior showing on its walls the actions of the González-Martirena studio. Infraestudio sought out shelter in words since their practice became steeped in a legal limbo: any private practice of architecture is illegal in Cuba according to the list of the National Classification of Economic Activities, issued in February 10, 2021. Architecture’s illegality in the Cuban context enhances its legibility.
Infraestudio’s repertoire of works includes two restaurants: one exposes how a functional typology holds ideologies of binary oppositions where function involves already a form of ideology and the “restaurant” condition is enough to stop change; the other shows a possible exit, in the words of Virgilio Piñera, a way to “move around the inevitable” by the everlasting form of formwork. There are also two houses: one speaks from the precariousness of the rural nightmare where we never cease to seize the premise of being urban, and another which builds a shelter amidst two intimate volumes of stone. And there is an art residence in an old house in El Vedado neighborhood which spreads off the property’s walls; and three promenades: an inside stroll through the Parliament that gives the gaze back its power through sheer transparency; a sequence of gardens where the personal city reveals its pauses; and a bridge that joins the architectural emblems of national aesthetics and politics.
“The paradox of action,” declared the Argentine writer Juan Jose Saer, “lies in the fact that its use of falsehood enhances its credibility.” These narrated constructions materialize, surprisingly, into full architectural expression. The elements that initially tried to be avoided, that would guarantee their construction by preventing local contingencies, lead to works that seem to have been generated through an inverse process. It is hard to believe that the first decision was not about materials, or scale, structural solutions or proportions, or light. The idea as the only non-negotiable trace saves them from what Rem Koolhaas called “the hindrance of architecture”. Thus, every reader’s buildings will be equally precise and true to themselves in all their versions.
III.
For decades, the new Cuban architecture dwelled in projects, in postponed plans and virtual buildings; in freehand drawings of corners traced by future writers. Thanks to Infraestudio’s unbeatable equation to produce realities, that time is past us. The project, as an exhibition format, has been overcome; the model holds a miniature city. Infraestudio found both a real and imaginary construction. Thus, the project has found an end in its double sense: the end as consummation, as finitude; and the end as a reason for being, a purpose. Overall, the project has also come to an end in Cuba. As students, Anadis González and Fernando Martirena were steeped in a conceptual education, hearing about works without being able to ground them in the landscape, unable to uphold their stature with their facades. Now, they produce architecture from within that myth, believing in action.
If you type in the name of their exhibition in Google, it shows up together with the LIGA webpage assuring us of its previous exhibitions. However, it is still possible that your visit is yet another illusion created by Infraestudio. They have convinced you that the gallery’s architecture is real, that the exhibition’s opening is on September 8, 2022, in Mexico City, on 176 Dr. Erazo Street. You have come this far. You have completed a stroll through the texts that invite you to imagine eight different spaces and before leaving the gallery you pick up from the floor the piece of paper which you now read with palpable materiality, even if this experience only occurs in your mind.
