This Thursday, the 1st of March 2012, a Sevillian art gallery El Fotomata will launch an exhibition by Fernando Alda “The poetry of a skeleton”, under the patronage by Gabriel Campuzano. We are honoured to invite you to the opening of the exhibition and to visit it at later stage, as it will be open until the 27th of April 2012.

Below you can find the presentation letter.

“If the Babel tower had been constructed, the architecture wouldn´t exist”.

Architetture ove il desiderio può abitare. Jacques Derrida

Fernando Alda and I, even though we may seem to be alike at times, we don´t exactly form a team. In other words , we don´t develop “collective work based on a common concept“. Our photographic proposals are intentionally independent and related to very personal interests. Although we are not that closely united, we share so much time and space, we exchange so many ideas, opinions and experiences, that sooner or later we must end up with a project  revealing this common grounds of our works.

These grounds consists of very diverse and unexplainable resources. Architecture enjoys a very singular presence among them: the space, in time, inhabited. Both of us, realized projects related to architecture in the past, from different points of view and aiming at different goals. From a personal perspective, they had very little in common. Now, or more precisely at the beginning of 2011, we directed our attention to a time in architecture that we consider totally disregarded. We decided, by mutual agreement, but with a very dissimilar approach, to record the construction process  itself and to set our observations and images against the ephemeral temporality of developing structures. The objective was to recognize the characteristic moments, identify the specific qualities, find the proper aesthetics and endow with certain materiality something that is generally perceived as transitory and fugitive.

Understanding architectural space and concepts has always evolved in parallel to philosophical thought and has been used as a metaphor to explain other concepts, not necessarily related to architecture. The fundamental reasons for that historical linkage are clearly identifiable since 1951 when Martin Heidegger expressed his reflection “build, inhabit, think” in a small German town of Darmstadt. A reflection, critical of the massive constructions erected after the Second World War, not that much established “from the architecture, nor the technology” that rather intended to encompass “that region to which all that there is belongs”. Even so, the architecture or more precisely, its theory, made this discourse totally its. It accepted the metaphor as its identity, and the understanding of architectural space and concepts enjoys a purely existential character today: “Building is really dwelling”; “Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth”; “Existence is spatial”.

From then on, likewise, the relations between photography and architecture are nothing but a logical outcome, independent of the instrumental value that one adopts in relation to the other one. That is, both if the photographic image has been constructed through an architectural object and if the architectural space has been described though the photographic techniques, the outcome must be comprehended as a manifestation of human existential space, that discriminates neither the photographed architecture nor the architecture photography.

Maybe that is why, Fernando Alda often enjoys observing the subtle difference  between his professional approach and his personal attitude towards architecture. He knows that working on describing buildings with photography on daily basis, he dedicates all his experience, intuition and poetry to recording a transient appearance. In a broader sense it is the description of a more conceptual architectonic space, a preview prior to moving in and just before it acquires its full significance of a human settlement. To the contrary, all of his personal projects were about reality and a constructed dwellings. This last one is an exception. “The poetry of a skeleton” forms a part of this query about existential space, now own construction oriented, exerting further efforts to penetrate the casing in which it shall be enclosed every day.

In the chapter 11 of the Genesis, we find the famous story about the Babel Tower: “(…) the whole world had one language and a common speech” when the Semites decided to build a tower “that reaches to the heavens”. That sort of an achievement was reserved for Jehovah, and so God considered it an intolerable daring and punished humanity with incomprehension, diversity and dispersion. A short, nine verse long story, has generated volumes of literature and iconography and all kinds of reflections, which in their totality overcome the legendary event.

The architecture in Genesis is described as a fixed limitation that must be respected in the case of every new construction. And too many times before, throughout its history, the certainty of improvement has immediately been replaced by dissatisfaction and helplessness in finding the persistence of the initial failure. Styles and eclecticism have changed so many times so maybe we can continue treating architecture as a proposal for understanding, homogeneity and grouping, but, at the same time  we should inevitably recognize chaos as our own, together with uniqueness and alienation that manifest freely during the construction process.

Gabriel Campuzano