One Minute Exhibitions

LIGA, Space for Architecture presents a series of consecutive exhibitions of short duration in which thinking and doing coincide in a near-simultaneous action.

During a four day period, LIGA, Space for Architecture in Mexico City presented a series of consecutive exhibitions of short duration by Mexican architects. While architecture often represents the idea of continuity in time, these exhibitions lasted only a few seconds. The ad-hoc shows, in which thinking and doing coincide in a near-simultaneous action, brought issues such as urgency, collaboration, improvisation and synthesis to the foreground, enabling new dynamics to activate and understand architectural practice.

LIGA 22: One minute exhibitions — LIGA 22, “One minute exhibitions”, Mexico City, 2016

As in LIGA’s regular three-monthly exhibitions, the gallery’s spatial condition becomes a crucial starting point. To date, over 20 architects have explored, measured, transformed and interacted with the same space through site-specific installations. At LIGA 22, the same exercise was approached in a new way with a spatial and temporal experiment of an ephemeral nature with documented results to be presented at a public event at LIGA, with the presence of the participating architects.

Iván Hernández, Ludens, proposes working with the texture of the walls that delimit the space with the intention of discovering what is hidden behind their apparent neutrality. So, equipped with hammer and chisel, he removes layer after layer of the wall plaster until he gets down to the concrete of the building structure. The material removed forms a geometric pattern that adapts to the surfaces affected. Cano Vera offers us a text that can be read in one minute, narrating the episode in which the architect Enric Miralles lost a button from his shirt that ended up in the hands of Rogelio Salmona. This same button, which was obtained by the author of the text, is on display in the gallery space as a fetish object, in a small hexagonal case.

The architect Axel Arañó, with the collaboration of César Martínez, organized an atmospheric intervention that fills the exhibition space with smoke before slicing it along two planes with a laser level. The ephemeral nature of the smoke creates moving drawings in the illuminated planes, redefining the axes of the exhibition space. Small gunpowder charges contrast with the stability of the laser, provoking little explosions, sparks that leap across the space, illuminating different areas for a moment.

DCPP proposes an experiment in which six individuals move around the space carrying glasses that drip black ink. In this way, the trajectories of the participants are recorded on the Kraft paper covering the floor of the gallery. The relationship with the surroundings of each of those involved is revealed by this trace. The subjects become aware of the movement of their body in the space.

Tezontle studio intervenes in the exhibition space following the guidelines suggested by the sections of the venue floor. At each intersection, the architects erect a one minute shrine. Each of these is the result of the accumulation or overlapping of everyday objects, construction materials, found stones, pre-Hispanic works and small jewels. The relationships established by assimilation or opposition and the unexpected encounters from a formal or aesthetic point of view complement the fact of elevating objects of no apparent value to the category of small monuments.

30 June 2016
LIGA 22. One minute exhibitions
Axel Arañó, Ludens, Cano Vera, DCPP and Tezontle
LIGA, Espacio para Arquitectura
Av. Insurgentes Sur 348-PH
Mexico City

One Minute Exhibitions

LIGA, Space for Architecture presents a series of consecutive exhibitions of short duration in which thinking and doing coincide in a near-simultaneous action.

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