LIGA 34: Tezontle
Fair Shelter
July 2021 – March 2022
Tezontle is a firm based in Mexico City made up of Lucas Cantú and Carlos H. Matos. Their work utilizes tools and codes from both architecture and sculpture, deliberately occupying a halfway point between the two disciplines. Drawing on a range of aesthetic and historical references, they have constructed an idiosyncratic imaginary that recalls a bucolic utopia, at once modernist, pre-Hispanic, and primitivist.
This Mexican duo presents an intervention at liga that describes part of an investigation titled —El Sinseñalismo—which explores the concepts of digital disconnectivity and deceleration and its relationship with art and architecture. Through this endeavor Tezontle seeks to suggest a reconnection with the elemental essence of humankind.
“Fair Shelter” is a living space for a fictional explorer: in which a ‘signal-less’ life can be sustained. A diorama of sorts, this space seeks to display this character’s life by means of a series of objects, artifacts, and sculptures that represent and symbolize the daily routine of the user. Elements that recall, through their interactions with the most basic forms of life, a way of relating and reconnecting with nature, with the essential, while questioning our contemporary way of living— behavioral patterns, customs, and uses we take for granted. By creating an ephemeral space, the installation also explores themes of temporality in architecture, calling into question the very notion of permanence.
Photography: Arturo Arrieta