"Could the configuration of the stones give men any control over the heat of their flesh?" Richard Sennett asked this question in his influential text Flesh and Stone. The body and the city in western civilization (1994).

 

Understanding architecture and urbanism as anatomy and the building as a body that breathes and through which the materials and data of our society flow and circulate, is part of the Terminal Architectures project in which Mercedes Pimiento (Sevilla, 1990) has been working recently. Building, connecting, affecting.

 

As a site-specific production of this ongoing project, in Technical pores the C3A building constructed by Nieto and Sobejano, its materials and the fact that it follows a self-similar, combinatorial geometric pattern without spatial hierarchies, serves Mercedes Pimiento to generate an installation as a modular system, that is linked to certain utopian urban experiences such as the No-Stop City (1970-1971) designed by the Florentine group Archizoom.

 

"The ultimate goal of modern architecture is the elimination of architecture itself." That was one of the claims that Archizoom defended in 1971 in his article Città, catena di montaggio del sociale. Ideologia e teoria della metropoli. In opposition to a figurative and/or objectual architecture, this group's proposal will be picked up again in the context of what Martin Pawley theorized years later in his text Terminal Architecture (1998), an essay in which he poses a reflection on contemporary architecture, proposing a double meaning of the "terminal" concept itself, firstly applicable to the aftermath or the exhaustion of a certain way of understanding architecture, and secondly, making reference to the emergence of a new conception that will develop through what he calls as new "terminals" or structures not only conceived to be habitable but fundamentally connectable.

 

This will be the question that Mercedes Pimiento is interested in about the C3A building, its connectivity, hence Technical pores is built as an installation in which the building's own materials and their characteristics in relation to the human body are the protagonists.

 

For this last question, in addition to the presence of latex as a synthetic skin, copper as a conductive material and membranes made with cement and fiberglass, Mercedes Pimiento investigates Helmholtz resonators, elements that allow her to work on the way in which the construction material itself absorbs certain sound frequencies such as voice, giving rise to a series of spherical sculptures that are scattered throughout the space.

 

Technical pores is an investigation about the technological organism that enables the building to function. Technical ceilings, walls and floors open to reveal the entire circuit of wiring and connections that runs through the construction. An affective acupuncture operation on a concrete body.

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Jesús Alcaide

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Exhibition: Living-Together. On being apart in common

Curated by Jesús Alcaide

Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucia C3A

14.01.2021 - 04.04.2021