Each place has a specific materiality, as well as a climate, flora, fauna, geology and the traces of history. While the landscape shows the existence of the diverse, the fluid, the simultaneous, and the superimposed, architecture, urbanism and design since the era of industrial modernity have oriented their practices towards the generic, the pure and static, distanced from the ecosystems. The use of construction materials, mostly of steel, plastic, concrete and glass, has created a language that homogenizes and normalizes the experience of space and the body. The pieces in the Construction Materials series are appropriations of industrially manufactured materials reproduced by hand with local materials, thus demonstrating the distance they have from the heterogeneous and unique material of each place and its manual transformation processes. The pieces also allude to the new techno fossils; sediments of industrial society that are already in the earth’s crust and have formed a new layer composed of steel, plastic and aluminium. The geological academy considers that we are living in a new geological era called the anthropocene, originated by the deep mark and transformation of the terrestrial crust left by human beings in the last one hundred years.
Construction Materials is part of the project ‘The Material of the landscape’. See more in:
The Material of the Landscape
Stones from various geological strata of the Andes