The Andes House ● Cristobal Palma

Exhibition 06
Paso [Passage] by The Andes House ● Soy una foto [I am a Photo] by Cristóbal Palma

26/07/2013 - 06/09/2013

Scar mountain range

Curatorial text by Martin Huberman

Exhibition 06 crosses the Andes Mountains, and sets foot in Santiago de Chile, to give shape to Monoambiente’s first international exhibition. The exhibition is a tension between the potency of the mountain range as a physical frontier in contrast to its dissipation as a cultural frontier in the face of the powerful crossroads of information that exists today, allowing for exchange, share and enhance the encounter.

On the one hand we invited The Andes House studio, whose work forges a fundamental link with material experimentation in the development of a vast catalogue of objects for the home, and on the other Cristóbal Palma, one of the continent’s most renowned architectural photographers, through whose lens the most outstanding works of recent years have passed.

The Andes House makes the process a permeable system that can be moved and thus break the distance that separates the studio from the gallery where the work unfolds to take over the space. The piece is at the same time reminiscent of that which separates us, the mountain range, bending the sense of the border towards that which also unites us. Paso shelters us in a sort of flag or court cloth that contains those who brandish it and make it a place of belonging. Palma ventures into the world of objects through a piece constructed in neon that attempts against the meaninglessness of the multiplication of self-referential images that flood the social networks.

Paso [Passage] by The Andes House

PASO [passage] represents the Andean mountain range as geographic icon of South America. With this fragile moving piece hanging in the air, The Andes House attempts to render the absence of real borders. It strains the relationship between the powerful mountain range as physical border, on the one hand, and its dissipation as cultural border in the current context where information is constantly crossed, a context that allows design and culture to be exchanged, shared, and thus grow stronger.

In the interest of constructing a transportable work, we decided to use textile, which is envisioned as a field of experimentation. PASO is a cloak made from 1200 triangles, symbolic synthesis of the peaks of the Andean mountains. The triangles are carefully dyed one at a time in a palette that ranges from blue to white and then stitched together. The work covers the gallery space in its entirety. It is suspended from the ceiling at twenty different points, hovering 1.20 meters above the floor. It is an inhabitable and light-weight space that subtly and playfully engages the idea of interior and exterior.

The Andes House transports its own mountain range, built on the basis of awareness of work with material informed by a local vision. It is the result of research performed on the problems of form, function, and production where materials and culture are reinterpreted in relation to their current context and condition.

Soy una foto [I am a photo] by Cristobal Palma

Communication

Flyers by Ariel di Lisio

Trailer - Cross the space

Exhibition 06 opening event

Side B

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.

The video shows the process of producing PASO the piece designed and produced by The Andes House, a Chilean studio that crossed the Andes, becoming infected with its peaks and colors. The journey culminated in an exhibition in Buenos Aires in conjunction with Soy una foto [I Am a Photo], a neon object that photographer Cristobal Palma developed with a local glass artisan as a sort of self-referential manifesto. The video is also an act of international collaboration that unifies, by means of an audiovisual narrative, production processes on both sides of the Andean mountains.

Direction: Carlos Molina & Martin Huberman

Special thanks to Celeste Bernardini from La Feliz, for her collaboration with the installation of the pieces.

Monoambiente in Barzón Magazine

Monoambiente is the first and only architecture and design gallery in the city of Buenos Aires whose objective is to promote the production of design disciplines by creating a space for reflection, discussion and exhibition, with the aim of re-establishing them as a cultural feature of the city.

In this desire to make the work produced by contemporary architects and designers accessible to the general public, this link arose with the magazine Barzón, which collaborates with the reproduction of pieces specially produced to celebrate each one of the exhibitions throughout 2013.

In this issue we present the series “Trapo” [rag], inspired by the symbolism of the banners and flags used by football fans to split borders, extending the domains of their passion to foreign territories. This series is a faithful sample of the militant character that takes the gallery beyond physical and political limits such as the Andes Mountains.

The Posters 2012 series was designed by Director de Negro™. Thanks to his dark palate and unique style, typographer Ariel Di Lisio is known the world over.

Trapo [rag] by Ariel di Lisio

La Cordillera revisited

by Patricio Pozo*

For its first exhibition in Argentina, the young Chilean design studio The Andes House envelops the Buenos Aires gallery Monoambiente with a textile that covers the entire room. The suspended piece – made up of 1139 pennants delicately hand-dyed in blue and white chromatic ranges – invites visitors to inhabit its interior, exchanging experiences, and sharing a moment or simply being.
PASO is a tribute to the mountain range that unites and separates us at the same time. It is also a reflection on the strategies of flexible exchange, through folds, between two nations to talk about design. It also proposes inescapable nods of communication: the Andes Mountains, the triangular shapes, the albiceleste tone, the distance between -if you’ll forgive the redundancy- the house of The Andes House in Santiago de Chile and the house that hosts them in Buenos Aires; exactly 1139 kilometres.

Mediating with the exterior of the gallery, the intervention by the Chilean artist Cristóbal Palma invites us to an exercise in disturbing visual rhetoric. Cleverly installed on the simple façade of the gallery, the work “Soy una foto” [I am a photo]- neon writing, produced in collaboration with a master of the craft in Buenos Aires – disregards, with humour and elegance, the impeccable trajectory of the author himself in the field of the most sophisticated and trendy architectural photography. On the other hand, if Palma’s piece directly points out its intention to be a photograph and if we agree that the definition of the dictionary of the Real Academia Española “photography is the art and technique of obtaining lasting images due to the action of light” seems reasonable, we can only agree with the neon, stop being so suspicious and start believing again.

In a world where the role of the designer is too limited, too restrictive and too submissive, the projects of these Chilean designers prefer collaboration with others and the creative risk involved in experimenting with unorthodox materials and production processes.
Deceptively simple in their final presentation, these artifacts are the result of a complex process of exploration that questions the way we relate to everyday objects. Constantly new and fresh, the initial surprise and strangeness of their proposals is invariably followed by the recognition of a design language of their own that invites us to integrate and welcome these pieces as if they were new friends.

*Patricio Pozo is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urban Studies of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, director of the design studio Pozo Marcic Ensamble and creative director of the Gimme Shelter! (Architecture and Urbanism Biennale, Hong Kong-Shenzhen, 2011), Chilean Design Now (London Design Festival 2012), Passion + Vision (Milan, 2012), Área Santiago: Processes and Transformations in Design, Art and Architecture (Santiago, 2013), Emergency Pavilion: Rebuilding Utopia (Venice Biennale, 2013) and High Noon: A Design portfolio from Chile (London Design Festival 2013).