MICROTOPÍA

 

Urban intervention
2017
In collaboration withDisbel Roque Bolaño
15W x 8L Mtr

Sand of the construction and cardboard templates shaped like lattice.

The action was about interfering in an outdoors parking for cars in Vedado, Havana City. Artists execute an exercise of reaffirmation of patterns in which when the external interferences (cars) affected the drawn patterns, they returned and rescued of the original design of the affected area. Each intervention created the opposite effect of the desired one, converting the design in an amorphous and deformed object.

https://youtu.be/uuuPnwSuUyk

Microtopia is a site spesific action in which artists perform an urban intervention for 10 hours. A design is created based on patterns whose maximum composition reached a scale (15m). The materials used were construction sand and cardboard stencils in the shape of lattices. This gesture in an open-air parking lot was a direct dialogue with the architectural constructions that surrounded the site, mostly capitalist aesthetic constructions. The patterns that composed the work, alluded in their visuality to the socialist realism type buildings.
The lattices are a series of monotonous decorations that compose abstract images in the multi-family buildings. The artists took these patterns to create a kind of mandala that assumed these images as "sacred" within a decadent socialist process. The daily flow of cars on the site was not affected, therefore, the interaction gradually caused the created structure to lose the form it was intended to maintain. The performative action was based on the continuous reaffirmation of an image that during the process was deconstructed at the same time that, in a gesture of reaffirmation of patterns, it was attempted to continue building without stopping.
The decomposition of an ideology, of a specific type of social system that at some point in history divided the world into two totally opposite poles, is today a concern for the citizens who still inhabit the last bunkers of the Socialist system. These countries, after acts of ideological resistance, try to constantly reaffirm and ratify their position before the world, an exercise that has become a crutch. The assumption of globalization and integration is inevitable, therefore, the mechanisms used by socialist systems appeal to capitalist instruments in order to survive.