Buldig, dwelling, thinking
Survey of contemporany art & architecture
This exhibition borrows the title of a famous intervention by Martin Heidegger to speak about the relationships between contemporary art and architecture. Beyond the culture of facades and the vertigo of the spectacle, a way of thinking and building develops and addresses the problem of living in a world that, although it is ideologically globalised, presents many inequalities. We need to learn to dwell again in the midst of complexity without resorting to uniform solutions or a complacent trend towards the neo-decorative. The comparison between artists with multiple languages and architects with innovative ideas perhaps enables us to visualise the fragments of our life in common. Contemporary life is that of the nonsite, on the basis of which different individual attitudes are established: escape, fear, the intensity of experience or rebellion. History transformed into a spectacle plunges everything “urgent” into oblivion. It is as though space were trapped by time, as though there were no other history than the news of the day or the day before, as though every individual story exhausted its reasons, its words and its images in the inexhaustible stock of a never-ending story in the present. Passengers in nonsites have the simultaneous experience of the perpetual present and finding themselves. But in the midst of the “strike of events”, in that permanent simulation that, according to Debord, has its psychological root in the adhesion generalised in what is there, disconcerting remains can be found, places on the border of nonsites. Alongside an important selection of architectural projects, this exhibition presents photographs, installations and video-projections of contemporary artists from Spain, Portugal and Latin America. In these creators there lies a desire to generate places but above all to think through their life in common and the subjective experience we can have at a time when everything seems to be dislocated. With ideas that do not exclude a lucid and, of course, a critical attitude, both artists and architects oblige us to think through our daily life without falling into the merely apocalyptic. Their projects and visions are anything but totalising; on the contrary, they reveal a subtlety in attention to details and, above all, assume that local aspects are crucial at a time of globalisation.