Page 163 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

These spaces are organized into a series of sequences on the basis of two elements: video screens and an array of terraced seats for viewers. The basic structure – a hybrid mixing monumental sculpture, street furniture and architectural fragment – is a terrace divided into serial configurations that create changing environments. Above these terraced seats, the screens look like banners or billboards in suburban spaces. Their different configurations allow for a range of possibilities: from nearly individualized viewing, to a large room with multiple screens in different sizes and modular seating at different heights affording variable points of view.
The whole spatial layout is based on this attempt to multiply a profusion of different positions for viewers, who are also in movement, with optional stops here and there. This pattern enables crossings, encounters, and multiplied access. The opposite rows of terraced seats replicate the very logic of present day cities: the requirement to face the alien and the stranger as the basis of everyday urban experience. Their design revisits the approach to space adopted by numerous utopian theatre projects – the optic box, the Meyerhold theatre, Bel Geddes’ intimate theatre, Archizoom’s impossible theatre, Sottsass’ planet as festival, etc – following the organisational modules of a pattern- based urbanism coping with human sociality in order to incite encounters, deliberate pauses as well as continuous wandering, a thorough organicity. As is typical of Colomer’s work, attention is paid to interstitial spaces, hallways, marginal places, locations where visitors may simply settle down to watch other viewers. As Clot explains: “As reality’s paraphrase, sculpture becomes stage scenery, scenography stretches into video post-production, characters are mapped onto people in the audience, in a reality that is exponentially multiplied towards a collective dimension of the gaze and the collective work that the artist’s labour in itself entails, in the exhibition hall commons.”12
Staging materials comprise an anonymous language that nevertheless functions as an archetype, as in some of Colomer’s prior installations, where props seem to fade into everyday austerity even as they structure space. Their distinctive presence is simultaneously a perpetual variation: their repetition alters the representational awareness of the subject using them.13 As Deleuze argued in Difference and Repetition,14 the repetition of speech patterns serves the same purpose as stuttering: to
12 Ibíd.
13 This is traditional
at international cultural events. In Edward S. Martin’s “A Short Sermon for Sight-Seers” (from the Official “Pan-American Art Hand- Book”, 1901) visitors to the 1901 Pan-American Exposition were advised to “please remember that when you get inside the gates you are part of the show and should take due pride in doing it credit”.
14 See Gilles Deleuze: Différence et Répétition, Paris: PUF, 1968; Eng. trans. by
P. Patton, Difference and Repetion, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
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