unemotional landscapes

[Spatial installation piece with video shown in Mutuo Gallery, 2023] ‘The Situationist’s derivé: ‘an unplanned journey through an urban landscape, where the participant drops their everyday relations and lets themselves be drawn by the attractions and encounters they find’ in order to create temporary environments and ‘constructions of the momentary ambiances of life’. Fascinated by the ‘tendedero’: the washing line on my own version of the ‘derivé’, I created this piece.. The ephemeral nature of these physical montages animate the city’s façades as the fabric dances in and exposes the presence of the wind. The solid and the fluid work in harmony. However, as I moved towards newly developed localities, these monotonous buildings began to loom and no longer was the threshold between the interior and exterior, private and public, material and natural blurred. The tendedero no longer present, the wind no longer visible. There is a lack of emotion across our rapidly growing urban landscapes. The monotonous sprawl has begun to look like we could be anywhere, in any city. Where is the emotion, the fluidity, the natural? For this site-specific spatial installation I reintroduced the idea of the ‘tendedero‘ in a contemporary district in Barcelona and filmed this interaction between the dancing fabric and motionless generic facade. Following this, I curated another installation for the gallery projecting the film I had made onto these same fabrics. This installation aims to alert people to how our cities are designed and the importance of embodying human emotion and nature. And so I ask at what point will all our laundry be concrete?