Monoambiente

The English words happening and happiness share their origin in the word hap, from Middle English: luck or chance, possibility for something to occur. Also deriving from it are the words, for example, perhaps or happenstance. Thus, in the Anglo-Saxon world, happiness is closely linked to the possibility or to the fact that things should happen. Making use of certain etymological creativity, we could think happening and happiness are synonyms. Or we could think happiness is being lucky enough for something to(or hopeful enough that something will) happen. This interpretation runs especially true for the projectual activities.

The works of Rosario Marquardt and Roberto Behar (R&R Studios) are unsettling because they are unbearably optimistic for our porteño,Tango-driven, mind-set. Yet also because they are sheer possibility: they are both presentation and representation, both real and imaginary. They are complete and inhabitable objects or spaces and also models: “souvenirs of an alternative world still to be built…”1. Instant Happiness, the work presented here, in their first show in Argentina, is thought as an assembly kit: multicolour curtains, lights and colourful pennants, confetti and paper ribbons. Like a snapshot of joy, which is also “memory and transfiguration of the merry-go-round and the amusement park, the social club, the dark room and Carnival”. The reconfigurable architecture of a nomad party always about to happen.

Soledad Rodríguez Zubieta is known as a musical programmer on radio as well as for her live performances as traditional DJ. Yet, since “music is infallible in its capacity to propose experiences” 2, her work has also a projectual dimension when such capacity becomes materialized, from her signature Modular, when requested to transform spaces for specific commercial or personal programs. It is what she calls “sound decoration”. But if music can be thought of as “decoration” of an architectural project, it is hard to imagine it as anything but the very structure of a party. Therefore, its Party Architecture is presented here as a compilation of dancefloor classics -that “transversal”, infallible music- of the last seven decades that works to complete the space structure proposed by R&R and explores the projectual capacity of making something happen.

What is a happy project other than one that happens?

1- Roberto Behar in Miami Stars, Alfonso Corona Martínez, Barzón 16, December, 2010.

2- Débora Cerchiara, Easy Listening, Barzón 29, August, 2013.

Project memory by Roberto Behar & Rosario Marquardt

At some point in his anguished wanderings through Buenos Aires, Remo Erdosian (Roberto Arlt, Los Siete Locos) would affirm “that joy is the most important thing”. That joy that escapes and that we catch for moments always on the run is what Instant Happiness tries to capture, in the fantastic Barrio Los Andes by the architect Fermin Bereterbide.
Instant Happiness is the memory and transfiguration of the square and the social club, the carousel and the Italpark, the darkroom and the carnival. The work transforms the gallery into a public space for meeting and sharing. The private becomes public and a “monoambiente” is transformed into a dream of a neighbourhood and city square.
In the manner of a model of architecture that we inhabit, Instant Happiness suggests a world of possibilities that, despite being fleeting, confirms in a small way our capacity to change the world into something better.
The work, conceived as an instrument for capturing joy, is a kit of parts that can be arranged as an object or a space, a three-dimensional painting or a penetrable sculpture. An oxymoron always on the run that can take on different forms and we would carry in a backpack from one place to another …. ready to be deployed without warning.
The piece includes multicoloured curtains, little lights, coloured banners and shredded paper. From these elements and the music of SRZ, a kind of architecture of emotion unfolds, which together with friends gives rise to the FIESTA [party] of everyone in the square.

Roberto & Rosario
August 2015