What once passed for a future or
The landscapes of the living dead
March 4 - April 2, 2005
Artists:
Alexander Apóstol, Walead Beshty, George Kontos and Santiago
Sierra
Curated by Magali Arriola
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ART2102 is pleased to present the work of Alexander Apóstol,
Walead Beshty, George Kontos and Santiago Sierra in What once
passed for a future or The landscapes of the living dead, an exhibition
curated by Magali Arriola. While planning the redesign of the
Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, the German architect Albert Speer
promulgated his theory of Ruin Value: by replacing reinforced
concrete with traditional masonry techniques, the dreary sight
of rusting rubble would be precluded while hastening the decaying
process of a building. This, in the future, would allow the architecture
of the present to stand as a remembrance of heroic and historical
times. Years later, Robert Smithson, wrote his multi-cited A tour
of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey where he formulated his
statement on Ruins in reverse regarding contemporary urban debris;
an “anti-romantic mise-en-scene” of the suburbs existing
“without a rational past and without the big events of history...
-just what passes for a future.” These two opposing views
on an anticipated future coincide in that they both imply an idea
of architecture that, following Smithson´s words, seems
to rise into ruins from its very conception.
Since the notions of past and future seem to have collapsed in
the haziness of contemporary urban landscape, What once passed
for a future or The landscapes of the living dead revisits what
might be regarded as the unattested memorials to the ruination
of urban modernity and the construction of mass utopia. It also
questions the place and function that the concept of ruin plays
in contemporary urban culture, opening the possibility of reinvesting
it with the political significance of looking backwards towards
the future.
The works of Alexander Apóstol (Venezuela), Walead Beshty
(US), George Kontos (Greece) and Santiago Sierra (Mexico) point
at the blurring of historical and cultural topographies following
the different fluctuations and constraints of their social, economical
or political coordinates. By bringing to the forefront both the
ideological construct that architectural and urban planning represent,
and the unprompted consumption of the built environment by its
users, these works challenge the notion of the ruin as a celebratory
and legitimating instance; it becomes instead an emblematic cue
that, by addressing casual memory as a substitute for long lasting
history, might help to recover some of the stories that have frequently
been silenced by what was once considered a redeeming future.
See our online forum that
features conversations with Rita Gonzalez, Magali Arriola, Walead
Beshty and Gabriela Jauregui
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