My presentation 20 slides, 20 seconds each.
Presented in Pechakucha Night, San Diego, July 20, 2009
· I am interested in fences.
This presentation is about one idea, about one simple object, one that we take for granted in our daily lives.
This presentation is about my interest in Fences. Fences that are inoffensive as the ones found in every home and fences that change the political relationships between countries.
I am also interested in fences that affect social structures. This was Friendship Park; a crucial meeting point for families that traveled miles, from the North and South, to meet each other and share a whole day together speaking across the fence.
I am also interested in the desires that intend to contest these fences. The fence as a stage for activism and performance.
I am interested in their porosity, when the fence is more than a line, when it becomes a space. Southbound in the US/Mex border part of my reality – everyday fences to come in and go out
In the city, I see the space of flows delimited by the fence
I am also interested in the screens and fences that are part of the urban fabric and everyday life.
I am interested in their value as mechanism for security
I am interested in them as objects that delimit personal space and the right to the city.
I am also interested on how they contain memory and our personal past.
I am interested in them as space of contemplation and poetics. Luis Barragan’s screen in the Capuchinas convent in Mexico City.
I am interested in the potential they have to imagine new political and institutional spaces through architecture.
Architecture, through the screen and the fence, operates as cultural ornament at an urban scale.
All these readings became the inspiration for three projects I designed in the last 3 years. The first one at the MCASD we experimented with the idea of porosity and the spatial possibilities of the fence.
Laser cut plywood panels with ornamentation at different scales made the object attain levels and intensities of porosity and visual engagement.
At the Santa Monica Museum of Art we experimented with the fence and its possiblity in delimitng spaces, zones and thresholds.
At the Children’s Museum we experimented with folding the fence into a spatial structure.
In all three projects I was interested in taking the political aspect of the fence towards the phenomenological (into a poetics of light).
I was also interested in the experience from within. The effects of looking out from them.
And finally, I am interested in fences because I believe that their realities, truths, myths and even their beauty can inspire both our worlds to coexist.