FOUNDATIONS by Víctor Santamarina + SCENES FROM THE POLDER WESTERN by Pilar Mata Dupont and Erika Roux
Double Building Fictions launch
Thursday June 29, 8pmFoundations
by Víctor Santamarina
“(…) Sheltering from the rain under the overpass he gestures towards the mud to continue to define in fragments the whole which itself incidental, to his life and my own, to the island and above all else the mud. He wants to resist the monument, to shelter his work in the obscurity of landscape, to allow it to calcify under the leaking highway, so as to accumulate a substantive archive, here under the passing cars which sound like waves. He wants to define and abandon substance, at the interstices of the concrete island and the drowned world, to suture in haste this flesh of a hybrid world. (…)” *
Foundations, documents an installation by Víctor Santamarina situated on the wetlands of the Eiland van Brienenoord, Rotterdam. Composed of a series of aluminium castings of leaks and liquid streams, the two sculptures are placed at the intertidal zone of the wetland. Appearing and disappearing as the tides come and go, the work takes part in the cyclical transformations that occur in this particular environment where the moon, water, human and non human beings constantly do and undo each other.
* Fragment from ‘Emergence/y’, text contribution of Felix Kalmenson for the publication.
+
Scenes from The Polder Western
by Pilar Mata Dupont and Erika Roux“I used to be like everyone else, scared about what will become of us. But one day, as I was strolling from town to town, all upset, no room for hope, feeling betrayed by a world that has given up on us, I had to stop at the beach to get some fresh sea air. I had the urge to take my revolver out, to take it all out, you know… I started to shoot like a maniac at the sea.”
by Pilar Mata Dupont and Erika Roux“I used to be like everyone else, scared about what will become of us. But one day, as I was strolling from town to town, all upset, no room for hope, feeling betrayed by a world that has given up on us, I had to stop at the beach to get some fresh sea air. I had the urge to take my revolver out, to take it all out, you know… I started to shoot like a maniac at the sea.”
Erika Roux and Pilar Mata Dupont share an interest in the cinematic tropes of the Western genre, within which they have found a playful and relevant language to reflect on different political perspectives and forms of relating to territory, nature, and community. Scenes from The Polder Western — a speculative screenplay — is an experiment in narrative and absurdism allowing them to research and investigate personal concerns arising from living in an environmentally vulnerable country facing complex issues, such as climate change and its subsequent (mis)management.
Both books are published by Building Fictions, an Amsterdam based publishing imprint that sets out to explore ‘building’ as a methodology, with the intent to highlight the potential of storytelling within practices at the intersection of art, design, architecture, literature.
