LIGA 30: Escobedo Soliz (Mex-Bol). Thorax
Photography: Arturo Arrieta
“I always fancied that you would take me to some place where there was a huge wicked spider, big as a man, and we should spend our lives looking at it and being afraid of it.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Posessed (1871-1872)
I know how this story ends and how it begins. A black line appears on the horizon indicating an apocalyptic storm. When it presents itself, a group of architects and volunteers build a ship to save themselves and later discover that their creation doesn’t pass through the door.
The interval in between these moments is even more con- fusing; there are days where I imagine stores looted by people who fight over inflatable pools to use as floating devices in a flooded city. Meanwhile, a pilgrimage of thousands of volunteers make their way to the inside of the gallery as if it were a mausoleum, deciding to take refuge in its cage while knowing that it won’t prevent the waterfrom coming in. In the wake of the announcement of the catastrophic storm I imagine a city, operationally deserted with no electricity and no one to govern it. Besieged, where the rats that lie dead on a ladder aren’t a symptom of a plague; but the pavilions made with the falsework of buildings left behind in the process of being built grow like moss, covering the existing city. Anonymous works of architecture that surface from people’s anxiety, their desire to interact with an urban system that they can only access digitally and communication depends on a maze- like phone book where any living being that faces the algorithm loses.
A story that unfolds in a self-destructed city, waiting for the water to justify the damages that it’s self-inflicted. Where the inhabitants that await obligatory exile occupy the streets, manning boats stranded on the pavement after abandoning proper buildings altogether. A chaos, a scenario as absurd and coherent as the one imagined in the year of 2019, seeing a multitude of tied ropes and poles, containing a space; an aesthetically charged atmosphere whose wrap- ping suggests a cage, bonfire or ark.
And so, at some point in this story emerges the group of architects that decide to build the ship inside of a room. Did they know the tragic nature of their act? Did the hands of the volunteers realize that the ark could not float? If the ship wasn’t an escape route, then what was it meant for?
The illusion of the end of the millennium, when it was possible to think that every city deserved a great museum it found its counterweight in the following decades based on financial, political and social crises that caricatured such buildings and master plans, leaving behind a trail of vacant constructions and maintenance costs. This period of optimism in the urban model, preceded by a conviction, produces among many responses antibiotic solutions that demonstrate that work resources exist or can be invented. Efforts to build systems that allow architecture to have a different relationship with society than what is established by the market. Whether directed by firms like Superstudio or ones that participate and condemn the events and models that, in appearance, despise of the style of Archizoom and Rem Koolhaas.
The architects in our story replicate that hedonistic and rational bucket of cold water, immersed in a city overwhelmed by its own demons, to which is worsened by that threatening black line. A scene where its own reason is what governs and originates a new universe based on the logical structure of a pole and a rope. There are no outlets in its components, not a single corner that doesn’t follow the modulation of its own system. The structure is constructively and structurally emancipated from the context that surrounds it and offers a refuge—a point of departure or a prison for those who enter it.
It would be even more dramatic to imagine that the work had begun before they even knew about the storm, thinking that it was the pavilion itself that provoked it in a kind of pagan ritual or offering. Assume that the group of architects who started it did so without knowing about that threat. And those who joined voluntarily attributed that purpose by seeing that there were no more boats, pools or ships in any store. That the participants never communicated with each other or even had awareness of the problem that the door presents, and they debated whether to practice a section on a building with the risk of collapse. In all of these options the challenged ship remained immaculate. It wasn’t necessary for any character in all of history to question it. It was the boulder being pushed uphill for eternity, the development of Asia’s infrastructure in debts, its own real estate bubble, Penelope’s weave keeping that complicated mob busy, wondering if their only plan would work.
One of these nights they finish construction, no more moorings are needed nor is it necessary to sack more buildings or festival halls. On the horizon, the black line becomes more dense while the occupants celebrate five hundred days of living inside the construction, knowing that in the city no work or obligation awaits them. The ship and the idea of the storm it represents is a pot where tension provoked by its inhabitants smoothly and homogeneously increases. Where a new order and society governs instigating wars, conspiracies and truces that happen with such force that the prospect of a flood is the least of their concerns.
Shock troops invade it and decide to dismantle it to build smaller ships with its parts. In retaliation, with the use of pepper gas, the architects fight back to reclaim their power and then manage to take a photo to portray their deserted creation. They claim the volunteers, who have turned into fanatics, their rights to the ship they have built with their own flesh. That they be allowed to hang on the walls the idols and tabernacles that they made in those years of community work and that they recognize them as authors for media purposes. They even demand new policies for data protection.
For the next five years abstract wars continue and with the heat of the sweat of prolonged revolts, humidity increases and the black line becomes a surface that covers the entire city. The story I write for this piece finally begins: “People yell, a storm responds. The ship, the shelter, the prison, doesn’t pass through the door.”
