Friday 27 January 2012

Change the past in a hanging garden

It's Friday and time for a bit of escapism.  There I was, researching away for a domestic project and, without any warning, I came across this.  Now I do like a iron structure, am partial to a tension wire or two and love the rawness of an industrial cityscape.  Having now spent some time looking at his substantial body of work and reading his statements, Hector Zamora has shot straight to the  top of my favourite artists list.  Errant, installed in Sao Paulo in 2010 was curated by an architect and was part of a project in Brazilian cities to work with issues including environment, urban planning and social marginalisation.






Suspension is actually the key word to describe this piece, pointing both to its physical and metaphorical reality: the epiphany of another latent, phantasmagorical city, which seems to emerge and rise over the real city, suspending it.

In choosing this site to host the Margem Project in São Paulo we try a critical approach to this confluence of relationships. If on the one hand the urban space in Tamanduateí river banks was subject to desertification, we must admit that it is still a space of maximum vitality in the dynamic and exclusivist city turned into a metropolis.

Zamora’s errant landscape goes through social and environmental criticism, but does not present a remedy for the urban nightmare. Quite the opposite, it is a true tour de force, which may be seen both as a Garden of Eden in an unsuitable location and as a hybrid, mutating nature, immobilized in a spider web. 

Guilherme Wisnik (architect and curator of project)

Makes you think doesn't it?  It is all at once arresting, interesting, complicated but also, a bit sad.  Poor trees, removed from a natural environment and dangled in the air so far from earth and water in the metropolis.  Exactly what these enormous, monstrous cities are doing to our landscapes and exactly what we should be considering when we look at this, I suspect.  On the other hand the trees are fighting back, flying in from outer space, a green army of environmental warriors at the front line. Clever.

Images and text from the artist's website






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