SERIAL RUINS

This project was presented in Liegenschaft Berlin, as part of the residency with Institut für Alles Mögliche (November 2017) and with Doch Collective (December 2017).

CONTEMPORARY RUINS AS COMMON OBJECTS
PART II

Berlin 2017
various materials


Since the uniqueness of waste construction material found on the street was one of the main concepts of the first part of the projects, the idea in this second part is to turn around this concept, that is, to work with the copy and the reproduction of the ruin following a serial production.

Doing so, our intention is, on one hand, to work precisely with the idea of copying a ruin. Just as on the other part of the project, we always like to relate the image of the old ruins with the contemporary ones, to think about this contrast. In this case, we thought about when, in the Renaissance the artists copied the antique artworks, from Greece and Rome. The fact is that they were coping ruins, and they were coping everything in white (consciously or not), while in Antique times the buildings and the sculptures were colorful. They used white marble because of its whiteness, and this whiteness, for example in the sculptures and in the buildings, became the symbol of the classicism, of its elegance and its nobility. We found this idea not only funny but also very meaningful: to think that we have constructed a great symbol of the occidental culture, as the concept and idea of classic and classicism based on a wrong copy, and that this has constructed an incorrect but despite everything fundamental aesthetic of our culture.

On the other hand, we wanted to turn around the idea we were working with in the first part of the project, that, is the uniqueness of the broken pieces. This way of working is a part of our methodology and of our making process: once a strong concept is settled, our aim is to continue by playing with it, trying to think what can we do with its opposite or with related concepts, and what happens if we stretch the original idea to a new way. In this case we swapped from the uniqueness to the serial copies, and to the annulment of their uniqueness. This was the key and the main reason of their beauty, and removing it allows us to create a new one, based on the absurdity and unexpected creation of many of our cultural constructions.
 



Photos: Philip Thorne and Ana Larrazábal.