The project
The will of time
From 2009 on, I have been uninterruptedly working on Project General León 51: carrying out a thorough registration of the spaces and unearthing the history of the site.
My intention has been to recover the traces that inhabitants and Time itself have left on the house since its construction in 1935. Towards this end, I have made use of the first-hand verbal and photographic testimonies left by the family that originally inhabited the space. In addition, a compilation of more than 3,000 photos on the current state of the house, accompanied by a series of reflections on emptiness and the passage of time have contributed to the process of unearthing vestiges of the house.
The result of this work was the compilation of the book “General León 51” (2012), which was supported in part by Fonca-Conaculta, via the Programa de Fomento a Proyectos y Coinversiones Culturales, a federal endowment for the arts.
The fact that the house was maintained in conditions of inhabitability and disuse caused the space to take on certain autonomy. The house lost its cadastral value and obtained a dynamic dimension – in the physical sense as much as in the symbolic and conceptual sense. Let us remember that there is no imagination without memory.
The house has been transforming into a mobile space – full of games, choreographies, encounters, frictions, emotions, memories, questionings, appropriations and languages.
The crux of this project – using the words of Marc Augé – is about rethinking space. I elaborate on Augé's idea of reconceptualization of space by adding the element of time, which alters a space and also makes it more dynamic.
To undertake the task of reconceptualizing the space of the house, I have selected five ways to experiment with the concept of the void, to better understand its human significance and its importance in relation to time: