Instalación "Maqueta para el Dante" Monumento a los Héroes 2014

Project Details

“Maqueta para el Dante” Monumento a los Héroes Installation 2014

DESCRIPTION

Maqueta para El Dante (Model for The Dante) is a project by José Alejandro Restrepo, developed at the invitation of the Museum of Bogotá and the District Institute of Cultural Heritage, with the support of the Bogotá Ibero-American Theater Festival.

In an effort to recreate the descent into hell of Dante’s universe, the artistic intervention Maqueta para El Dante proposes an inverted route through Bogotá’s Monumento a los Héroes. After ascending along an external scaffolding structure installed on the façade, visitors descend through the interior of the building and exit through the door normally used as the monument’s entrance. All of the works presented in the project are audiovisual—projections and sound installations—so the overall route takes place in low-light conditions, with the necessary dimness required for the proper movement of visitors through the building’s interior.

Following our previous collaboration with Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi on the 2009 installation Lugares Comunes (Common Places), we were contacted to develop an exterior structure that would allow visitors to reach the roof of the monument while also creating a scenographic frame around it. The project was resolved through the installation of two 24-meter-high modular scaffolding towers on the eastern and western façades, connected at the top by a bridge. This upper structure supports a pavilion and stepped seating that function as an entrance hall, receiving visitors while offering them unusual views over the city.

The structure builds a symmetrical frame around the monument’s central axis, externalizing the geometric principles embedded within it. These can be recognized in the monumentality of the central staircase, its proportions, the absence of perimeter openings, and the sense of hermetic enclosure produced by a monolithic reinforced-concrete structure. The building stands as one of the few surviving examples in Colombia of an architecture historically associated with fascist ideology.

The Monumento a los Héroes is an element of Bogotá’s urban heritage that remains largely unknown to the city’s inhabitants, both in terms of its interior spaces and its contested history. Originally conceived during the government of Laureano Gómez as a joint commemoration of those who died in the Bolivarian wars of independence and Colombian soldiers killed in the Korean War, the initial project was designed in 1952 by futurist and fascist architect Angiolo Mazzoni, in collaboration with sculptor Ludovico Consorti, another collaborator of Benito Mussolini’s regime. The final version of the monument, inaugurated in 1963, bears no clear relationship to its originally intended use for reasons that remain uncertain, leaving the building in its current condition as an empty receptacle for a silenced memory.

The scaffolding structure, installed and dismantled in periods of three days, also served as support for information, signage, and a lighting installation that transformed the landscape of Bogotá’s Autopista Norte for one week. More than 10,000 people ultimately visited the work.

DETAILS

Use

Ephemeral Installation

Area

200 m²

Location

Bogotá D. C. – Colombia

Meters above the sea level

2625

Average annual temperature

13.1 °C

Year

2014

Client

District Institute of Cultural Heritage IDPC

Artist

José Alejandro Restrepo

Design and construction

Yemail Architecture (Oficina Informal)

Project team

Antonio Yemail + Mariana Murcia + Juan Anzola

General production

Julien Pettit

Scaffolding

Equipos Gleason + Serrano Gómez

Graphic design

Yesica Acosta Molina

Photo credits

Santiago Pinyol

Categories: Culture