Microgravity: Héctor Zamora

Models of microgravitational spaces lighten the load of daily life and allow us to grasp a veil of lightness.

Born in Mexico City in 1973, Zamora currently lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. He graduated in graphic design from UAM – X, Mexico City, in 1998. He has created his most significant pieces by working on public spaces, often rearticulating the physical characteristics of an urban or architectural environment. The Mexican artist creates feather-light structures that sometimes float or give an impression of buoyancy, despite the heavy materials used to make them, such as concrete, brick and stone. Appropriating public space, he involves local communities in complex but fun collective endeavours, creating installations that highlight aspects of city life which would otherwise be taken for granted.

15 October 2009: in almost identical modernist corner-buildings in the centre of Bogotá, Colombia, two floors are jam-packed – floor to ceiling – with hundreds and hundreds of vividly green bananas. 8 November 2009: over the past 20 days the bananas, spilling out of the window frames, have slowly turned from green to yellow, and from yellow into a mouldy brown and pungentsmelling landscape. In Bogotá's newspapers, reporters speculated about what to make of this piece installed by artist Héctor Zamora (born in 1974, Mexico City). Was it a social critique on aggression in the inner city? Or did it mean to comment on the banana scandal that just two years prior had culminated in Chiquita Brands being fined 25 million dollars for their ties to Colombian paramilitary groups? Or did it delve even deeper into national heartsores and refer to the "Banana Massacre" of 1928 when the government brutally ended a plantation workers' strike? None of the above.

Although Zamora is fully conversant about the social history of bananas in Colombia, he created Atopic Delirium as an intentionally naive response to the all-encompassing presence of the banana in day-to-day Colombian street life. He described the work as a living painting that changes our perspective on the skin of buildings, a work free of overt political meaning. Zamora's banana piece is often regarded as the key to his oeuvre, but I believe his work is best analysed starting from a 2008 public intervention titled Every Belgian is born with a brick in the stomach. Staged in Genk, Belgium, Zamora worked with a local audience to create words from locally found bricks in the middle of a pit among coalmine waste. He described the project as an expression of graffiti.
I wonder if it can be seen as a gentle plotting away at gravity instead. There is a certain heaviness to our time, which sharply contrasts with roughly 100 years ago when, despite brewing political unrest, we were avidly and enthusiastically experimenting with aeroplanes, Zeppelins and construction methods.

Many of our current cultures seem weighed down by responsibility, stress, fear, doubt and, perhaps first and foremost, the burdens of consumer products. In his Genk piece, Zamora plays with that heavy underbelly feeling that we all occasionally have, in a setting that can be interpreted as a reference to Newton's understanding of gravity as being a force of attraction between two objects: in this case earth and the body. Much of Zamora's work is about this struggle of weight versus weightlessness. Zamora creates lightweight structures that are often floating or give the impression of being afloat. There is some obvious inspiration in the work of icons of lightness such as Frei Otto and Buckminster Fuller, but also a perhaps fortunate lack of architectural ambition. Zamora is not wowing with detailed architectural drawings or with the latest lightweight materials. He frequently employs heavy materials such as concrete, brick or stone to challenge our preconceived notions of lightness. Most of Zamora's projects are not meant to be an intrinsic part of the urban landscapes either. They are transient and subtly emphasise certain aspects of city life that we otherwise take for granted too easily. They range from ephemeral pieces that slightly amend urban space – such as the hammock work addressing a lack of leisure time (Nagoya, 2010), a slowly growing structure of rubber floats (São Paulo, 2006), and a playful rope assembly (Havana, 2006), as well as a series of suspended trees over a canal (São Paulo, 2010), and floating balloons (Busan, 2006) – to pieces that almost become architecture – ranging from the floating sheet roofs over a parking lot (Cuernavaca, 2006), the red plastic membrane that snaked through, around and over a gallery space (Mexico City, 2003), to the large-scale parasitical structure hanging off the roof of the Museo Carrillo Gil (Mexico City, 2004).

Zamora's projects measure and reduce the weight of culture and enable us to break loose occasionally from the gravitational pull of our cities into a fleeting periphery of microgravity: an environment where the force of gravity is still present but for a moment only with a negligible effect. He leads us to this state of mind not by being overtly forthright or political, like many of his contemporary peers, but by creating environments where not even he has full control over how they are used, changed or perceived. It is in these types of microgravity spaces that Zamora shows us that a banana, even in the most charged cultural context, can still be a banana if we so desire, and that sporadically we may allow ourselves to cling to a degree of lightness amid the gravitas of everyday life.

Microgravity: Héctor Zamora

Models of microgravitational spaces lighten the load of daily life and allow us to grasp a veil of lightness.

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