LIGA 05: Adamo-Faiden (Arg). An Environment
Photography: Ramiro Chaves
Proposing “an environment” for the exhibition of a series of architectural works in a single space—creating an environment within an environment—seems to be a contradiction in terms, if not a redundancy—an environment that is already an environment—or a clearly rhetorical proposition—an environment that is reiterated as “an environment.” It is like painting white on a white canvas. In this case on the spatial canvas of the white cube of an architecture gallery, the exact circumstance in which the architecture of a cultural event transcends because it represents the material architectural act.
At first glance, such a proposal, as well as the larger project that it embodies and reproduces, would seem to be imbued with a paradoxical will: that of producing a “thing” as such while being assumed as such, and that uses the place where it is situated as if it were its material, therefore getting conflated with it. Moreover, this is not just “any” place, but a particularly objectified space, charged with an institutional will, and characterized for its extremely reduced size, to the extent that it is not completely clear whether it is in fact inhabitable or not. The space has a high, yet mediated exposure to the exterior; a corner on a busy avenue where disproportionate, equally objectified windows frame the views as much as they condition them. Located next to the open hall of an architecturally well-known building, to which the space’s third face is visually oriented, even if only to make it appear hermetic.
In this paradoxical, ambivalent context of LIGA, Sebastián Adamo and Marcelo Faiden aim to simultaneously constitute, replace, emphasize, and contain “an environment” as a premise. Their project rehearses a subtle but intensely distorted sense of the classical ideas of unity, identity, irreducibility, and singularity in architecture, all of which manifest themselves here congested in the construction of an “intense interiority,” which reveals itself as the “inscrutable exposure” of a pure exteriority. The pure exteriority is explicitly offered as a built atmosphere, and the intense interiority is tacitly exclusive of any form of atmospheric intrusiveness. It is as if it were a capsule, not in the sense of an object, but referring to its double nature of being perceptible but impenetrable, or, more accurately, of an incubation space. Compare it to a test tube, where any physical access of “real” human beings would be, if not unwanted, certainly unusual, strange, and unthinkable. Or as if that environment had ended up being there after a series of failed tests, surviving humankind, as if it were a post-human record, recalling what used to be known as architecture, now a foolish and blurred idea. This exhibition presents, for those who, decades ago, celebrated the death of architecture (and for those who still do), an architectural celebration of the death of mankind (not without a pinch of melancholy), a sample of an imprudent, improbable, diffuse, and yet still preserved memory of the idea of habitat.
An Environment unifies object and subject(s) into a specifically abstract subject of architecture, one that is inert and post-human. An Environment is whatever environment, in respect to the monumental idea of space as entelechy. Selected from a catalog of one single possibility, it is a whateverness made singularity.1 An Environment builds a form of emptiness and draws from it a sense of the architectural that is both figuratively indefinite and materially precise, a generic embodiment of the incorporeal. An Environment turns everything—space, objects, images, enclosure, ground, light, energy, machines, and technology—into a diffuse and vague medium, even with the conceptual thinking about it. An Environment happens as a mental space characterized by the uncertainty of its own being, an uncertainty that doesn’t contain any doubt. It is a space of indiscernibility, a region of undecidability and banal ubiquity. An Environment is, obviously and quite literally, an atmosphere, a constructed climate, and a climax that comes to the fore figuratively. Allegory of a perpetual but variable state, its variability and its relativity as a presence, make it absolute and extensive. Its formlessness exceeds a mere lack of shape and takes the form of an abstract form of affect. Could it actually be a manifesto of affect as erectible fact? Its architecture dissolves as object and simultaneously manifests itself as a strictly material medium. It embraces vagueness and aims to build it as an object-medium, as an environment with an outline.
Precisely because of its ability to manifest itself hermetically, we find ourselves in front, and virtually inside of, an architecture that assumes itself as the medium of the contemporary void, as the spatiality of the whatever, a restless ecosystem where culture has turned into vapor and wants to become (once again) pure life, experience of pure immediacy. The architectural work, tenuously exhibited inside, is, just like those cryptic construction details, its obverse.
