Page 162 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

10 Jameson, op. cit., p. xiii.
and the traces of its having been lived in, broken-in, used, are intimations of the need to inhabit the uninhabitable, beginning with the Pavilion itself.
Next to this object are piled up a number of scale models, prototypes, and reproductions of vernacular architectures evoking marginal spatialities, the imaginaries of city-outskirts: parking lots in shopping malls, transition spaces, or housing blocks, which are also modernity’s genetic reservoir stored in popular architecture in cities throughout the world. The human scale characterizing Colomer’s work thus introduces a fictional experience, since scale shifts pave the way for speculation. The purpose of the installation, however, is not to offer formal solutions, modes of spatial organisation, or detailed urban planning conceptions, but to radically showcase displacement in an accretion of potential forms as opposed to a kind of architecture implicitly conveying the idea of stability. Scale models are piled up suggesting potential uses, as if they were ready to be displaced, translocated, utilised. This underscores their nature as semes, units of meaning within a broader semantic field: As was also the case with the moveable structure, the means of production are shown to be part of the work’s narrative. As Jameson wrote: “Our imaginations are hostages to our own mode of production,”10 that is, fantasy is circumscribed by historical conditions of possibility.
The terraced seats around this installation highlight the layout of the access space as a site for political gatherings without an obvious result, as though lying in wait for potential ceremonies yet to come. The seats allow for the possibility of sitting down to watch, of becoming participants or participating by watching others act. Just as an illusionist reveals the trick behind the magic, Colomer suspends the public’s disbelief and simultaneously breaks the fourth wall, in a typical move that critic Manel Clot defined as “a struggle to create an atmosphere brimming with life”.11
The rooms around the perimeter are arranged in an itinerary that spectators can traverse in either direction, but indeed choices have to be made: Whether to open and walk across doors, crossing the thresholds connecting the central plaza with other areas. This spatial layout demands decisions that lead to responsibility or commitment: spectatorship as a form of awareness, rather than a naturalized automatism. At the Pavilion, doors and thresholds become objects of spatial interpretation.
11 Manel Clot: “Schaflende: La palabra no
dicha (el hombre de los lobos)”
in Acción Paralela, núm. 2, 1996.
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