Monumento "Escenario posible" Parque del Bicentenario 2016

Project Details

“Possible Scenario” Monument Parque del Bicentenario 2016

DESCRIPTION

The artistic intervention, initially proposed for the Plazoleta de las Flores at the intersection of Calle 26 and Avenida Caracas on the southwest corner, takes the form of a material presence occupying approximately 64 square meters. It is composed of nine concrete piles tied together by structural steel beams capable of supporting any future platform or stage, depending on the needs of different proposals.

The presence operates as an open structure ready to be used: a system of supports that recalls the columns rising above the roofs of houses still under construction. It becomes a metaphor of hope—a recurring idea in Ricardo Toledo’s work—understood through the desire to “continue the building,” an image deeply associated with self-built housing processes in working-class neighborhoods.

The work emerged from the convergence of experiences and collective work developed within the Memory and Life Creation Laboratory during 2015. The laboratory unfolded over twenty-four sessions across three months at the Center for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation and was made possible through an agreement between several district institutions.

Its formal and conceptual development was guided by academic and artistic actions, as well as by dialogue among experts in art and curatorship, structural engineering, and questions surrounding collective art, memory, writing, and commemoration.

This work focused on giving concrete form to both the idea and the intervention, while continuously challenging the traditional, classical, nineteenth-century notion of the monument. The laboratory also allowed for a deeper exploration of the qualities and conditions of “the contemporary” in public art, particularly notions of the ephemeral, the transient, the temporary, and the time of public space. At the same time, the project considered forms of expression particularly effective in the public realm: action, activism, discourse, gesture, the presence of the body, and a broader understanding of the artwork as a “stage” for artistic action. These ideas led toward a condition in which physical presence becomes only the suggestion or marking of a place of encounter, open and prepared for activity.

It is therefore a non-monument monument: a physical mark that commemorates in space a memory directed toward the future, a commemoration of what is yet to come. The piles remain in a state of suspension, like any work of art before action, before movement, before the bodies that activate it.

A system of bases or supports that carries within it the possibility of being reconstituted again and again, reactivating memory each time; a structure prepared to support what is yet to come, with utopia understood as a social force for making the possible imaginable.

Mario Opazo, Artistic Director of the Memory and Life Creation Laboratory.

DETAILS

Use

Artistic Intervention

Type

Installation

Area

36 m²

Location

Bogotá D. C. Colombia

Meters above the sea level

2625

Average annual temperature

13.1 °C

Year

2015

Client

District Secretary of Culture + Fundación Arteria

Design

Yemail Architecture

Project team

Antonio Yemail + José Luis Hoyos

Artist

Mario Opazo

Architectural Model

Sebastian Velez

Photo Credits

Luis Carlos Diaz

Categories: City