A Column is a System ● Curated with LIGA, Space for architecture, DF (MX)

Exhibition 15
A Column is a System ● Curated with LIGA, Space for architecture, DF (MX)

23/07/2016 - 24/09/2016

LIGA in MONOAMBIENTE: S-AR
(LIGA 23)

Curatorial text LIGA, Espacio para Arquitectura DF

For its twenty-third edition, LIGA is to function as both host and guest at once, dealing with both aspects of the work of an architecture exhibition, at the request of the Argentine gallery Monoambiente, which is organizing the Collaboratory. This curatorial experiment invites three institutions to develop a specific proposal for its space in Buenos Aires. As a result, Storefront for Art and Architecture (United States), The Canadian Centre for Architecture (Canada) and LIGA, Espacio para Arquitectura, DF (Mexico) are collaborating for the first time on a single project, with support from the Graham Foundation (Chicago), and in the process reinforcing the concept of a pan-American network.

Spreading this net, the Monterrey architects S-AR were caught up in it and accepted the challenge of a simultaneous intervention at LIGA and at Monoambiente. To achieve this, the members of S-AR propose not an isolated piece, but a strategy applicable to each of the two spaces, and topologically equivalent in both cases. The connection is also established through the material—steel mesh—and in counterpoint, since the steel is left raw in one space and painted white in the other. While in LIGA the work runs around the perimeter of the space with its three columns, wrapping it from inside in successive, see-through layers, in Monoambiente a single, imaginary, central column rises.

In both spaces, the overlapping meshes produces a moiré effect. This optical effect, perceived when two patterns of near-parallel lines overlap, occurs between meshes separated by just a few centimeters, but also between those that are thousands of kilometers apart, in two different hemispheres, conceptually superimposed from Mexico City to Buenos Aires.

About LIGA:

LIGA, Space for Architecture is an independent platform founded in Mexico City in 2011 that promotes Latin American contemporary architecture through exhibitions, conferences and workshops.

A column is a system by S-AR

Our proposed invention for Monoambiente Gallery is complementary to the piece we [J1] proposed for LIGA. Because they will be exhibited at the same time, we are interested in formulating a dialogue between the two works—one based, at times, on contrast, at others, on formal, spatial, or experiential relation, and at others still, on the materials used.

The proposal is a reflection on the piece at LIGA—or perhaps a reflexive reaction to it—from a perspective that, though independent of the site in terms of form, material, and structural strategy, also engages the site, that is, assimilates LIGA as one space-gallery to Monoambiente, another space-gallery.

Similarly, on the basis of a geometric reading of the structure of the space that gives rise to the LIGA proposal, we intend to transfer that structure and geometry virtually, completing it, making it whole or, at least, effecting that operation on one of its parts, specifically one of the three main columns in the LIGA space.

Part of the proposal for LIGA, then, will be completed at Monoambiente in a reflection on elements produced by means of an entire imaginary column embedded in the center of the Monoambiente space on a platform that represents LIGA’s floor. The column will be surrounded by layers of concentric metal mesh that produce a visual experience like the one produced by the piece at LIGA. The limit is material, not visual, and activated by the viewer walking around the piece, which is a sort of dematerialized volume.

The color of the metal mesh at LIGA is light whereas the mesh at Monoambiente will be dark. The effect is deepened at Monoambiente where the column’s material is reflective, producing a visual labyrinth between object and viewer that expands the gallery space.

Drawings on the ceiling and floor of the Monoambiente gallery further the idea of the virtual present and of the trace of the limits in dimension that relate the two spaces.

S-AR

Title: A column is a system

Description: Job-shop-style arc-welded metal mesh, carbon metal, cement, paint

Dimensions: 2.30m (diameter) x 3.90m

Galería Monoambiente 2016, Site specific

(Im)Material passage
19° 25’ 10” N, 99° 8’ 44” W
34° 35’ 59” S, 58° 22’ 55” W

Curatorial text by Inés Molinari

It is not an impossibility for an object to be both “here” and “there” at the same time. Apparently, quantum physics can explain such an superimposition through the problem of measurement: as long as we are not observing a phenomenon, or measuring it, the smallest elements that make it up behave as they like and, if they seek to do so, could be in two places at once.

In Buenos Aires and in Mexico two works that speak the same language are shown at the same time. In parallel, two objects redefine the space of each of the gallery spaces. The same strategy is deployed both here and there. We can only observe one of the two at any one moment, and a few small differences offer clues that it is not the same object. But the pieces connect in such a way that they generate an (im)material passage that links the two exhibition spaces which share a single mission.

Thanks to the collaboration with LIGA, we have the opportunity to welcome S-AR, a Mexican studio that grounds its work in research and experimentation, developing a new way of approaching architecture in each of their projects.

In its passage through Monoambiente, S-AR leaves us with an intervention that seems to defy time and space with a game in which simultaneously and in a coordinated manner, over 7,000 km apart, they appear to form a complete work. One is not without the other, and vice versa.

Images from Exhibition #15

Fotos por Manuel Ciarlotti Bidinost

Communication

Flyers & Tríptico by Ariel Di Lisio

Conferences Liga y S-AR at Monte

Conference archive

Workshop S-AR at Oficios Asociados

Archive Workshop

Exhibition 15 opening event

B Side

Montajes [Production and installation of the exhibition] is a series of videos on the processes of constructing the space; it tracks the efforts made in the production of the pieces that have intervened in the Monoambiente gallery space.

Direction: Causa RDC