Please visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Garaizabal
MANIFEST 2007
“There are living pasts and dead pasts. Some pasts are the liveliest instigators of the present and the best springboards into the future…” Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White.
Memorias Urbanas.
My Urban Memories are large format artistic installations that aim at recreating the spirit of heroic stories. Time does not exist. The only reality are the extraordinary happenings that have or will occur in one place.
Beauty is an absolute value, but when there comes a time to pay tribute to a phenomenon, I organize it’s positive values, searching for a heroic component. This esthetic and ethic work contributes decisively to satisfy these portraits of the soul, in which integrity occupies a preferential place. Integrity, the capacity to “stand behind an ideal” , is applicable to constructions as well as to people. The hero is known for his deeds, for his creation and contribution, for the positive net balance of his consumption. This essence can be located in individual components. If there is no ego there is no consciousness; there is nothing.
What originally triggers this process is the identification, as an author, of my conviction and individual vision of the soul to be rescued from a project that “must be done”. This same romantic mechanism leads others to join and push projects by spontaneous natural affinity with their ideals and their conceptual and esthetic greatness. A collective vision can add up, but a chain of compatible individual visions multiplies. “Think separately, get together to act.” To raise Urban Memories, unusual structures that defy convention, a large series of obstacles must be overcome. That energy of similar individual thoughts is unstoppable. In fact, it is this same energy that finishes monumentalizing each project in which, now at the public disposal, many individuals invest their personal ideas of grandeur, their energy. Their images and mental projections are the true power of humanity, which, among other things, in its time enabled the original phenomenon. People’s dreams are the actual working material, the single true transformation agent available to mankind.
Both the methods and the technology are revolutionary. The structures are the result of the search for the outline, the essence of each of the elements. The soul resides in the master lines, metal nerves that transmit and support all the efforts of the original construction, every line offsetting others and all comprising a whole. At the same time this approach presents the best and most complete opening to the surroundings, stripped of walls, able to be dismantled, transported, and put back together again. The engineering process and the challenges it presents stretches thought, which produces a minimal presence, sustainable mechanisms, impressive absences.
