LIGA 22: Axel Arañó/Cano Vera/DCPP/Iván Hernández/Tezontle (Mex)

One Minute Exhibitions

LIGA 22: Axel Arañó/Cano Vera/DCPP/Iván Hernández/Tezontle
One Minute Exhibitions
June, 2016

During a four day period, LIGA, Space for Architecture, Mexico City presented a series of consecutive one-minute-length exhibitions within the gallery space. For each exhibition, LIGA invited a Mexican architect or architectural studio.

As in LIGA’s three-month exhibitions, the gallery’s spatial condition becomes a crucial starting point. Until now, over 20 architects have explored, measured, transformed and interacted with the same space through site-specific installations. Now, the same practice repeats itself through a spatial and temporary experiment of fleeting nature, unmediated. After this experimental exhibition series, LIGA will present the documentary material of the exhibitions in a public event, where the participating architects will be invited to talk about the experience.

Ludens

The invitation to participate in the exhibition arrived like a challenge: An intervention in a lapse of just a minute. My single reaction is an immediate one: To respond with the same brevity. An action/reaction.

Leave a brief trace, Draw space in the space. Better still, reveal a pre-existing spatial characteristic of the space; Unveil an aspect of the space – Make an archeological window – Remove the superficial, Uncover the layers that make up a surface. Sometimes, it is more efficient to destroy than to build. Hammer and chisel – exerting pressure on the architecture with the body – impact – incision – scar.

The archeological window is almost imperceptible. The evidence falls to the floor – there lies the trace of a gesture, more than an action.

Cano Vera

Fetish: 1. Idol or cult object to which supernatural powers are attributed, especially among primitive peoples. A button from the left cuff of the white shirt used by the architect Enric Miralles one night during his stay in Mexico City in October 1994. The button was collected from a glass ashtray in the bar of the Camino Real Hotel where the late architect was staying. The button fell accidentally into a glass of gin and tonic, from which it was removed, between the finger and thumb of the Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona, who was enjoying that memorable evening with the Catalan architect, before being deposited in the abovementioned ashtray.

Plummeting plumb – Axel Arañó con César Martínez

Ephemeral and ethereal intervention that takes place in the air, consisting of defining two perpendicular planes using plumb line and spirit level, using light and smoke in movement. The smoke occupies the totality of the space-volume of the room and the planes divide it like two Cartesian axes into an up and a down, and a right side and a left side. The gunpowder in the rockets contributes to the smoke machine to fill the space, leaving slight traces of flame on the windowsills, a minimal testimony to action. Any material can be used to make a plumb line, indicating a direct line to the center of the earth with any kind of object hung from a string, though the heavy metal lead (plomo) shares its etymology with this action. From the outset the vertical and the horizontal have been decisive in the development of architecture, and the intervention alludes to these two concepts through the use of two laser beams and smoke. The smoke makes visible the planes of light, and these in turn make the smoke visible. Atmosphere and light, two natures in conjunction that architecture orders and defines, make themselves tangible without solid material.

DCPP Arquitectos ( PPAA)

We seek to rediscover the environment as an intimate and individual relationship with the subject who experiences it. Without altering the spatial and temporal quality of the site, or conditioning, mutilating or altering the physiological capacities of the subject, we employ a subtle resource that ruptures the balance of the everyday and ordinary relationship between the individual and their space. We propose that the subject takes consciousness of their penetration in the reality of time and space, affecting the image of space in an unintentional manner, turning them into an agent who manipulates it. They will react outside of the everyday dynamic of being in space and perceive it in different ways: perhaps conscious, perhaps distinct, perhaps stimulated. The subject recognizes their authentic relationship with their surroundings on the basis of their own trace within them, the black ink. An I-change-I-live relationship emerges in the site that breaks with the I (simply)- am in the place. (I’m on the phone?) We seek reactions and relationships rather than specific answers.

Ad-hoc-ism – Tezontle

A design principle based on everyday improvisation: a bottle becomes a candlestick, a dictionary becomes a doorstop, or a stone becomes a paperweight. Simply and plainly: to work with what is there. One minute exhibitions. The title of the exhibition invites immediacy. Tezontle takes fragments of objects from its everyday work. Pieces of models, found objects, gathered pebbles, gathered and assembled into One Minute Shrines. Reconfiguring this material in the form of a shrine, it is transformed from chaos into order. Different layers of information emerge: the material, the symbol, the lack of scale, the boundary between the order of natural things and the order of manufactured things. One Minute Shrines At the start, only Stones and Dust. And two stones make a line, wherever they are. And another stone outside the line forms a corner, wherever it is. And so vertigo arrives. And at each corner, a shrine is built. And the vertigo goes away.

Ludens – Iván Hernández

Cano Vera

Axel Arañó

PPAA Arquitectos

Tezontle