No Fixed Abode

Digital video in DVD, loop, 2002

The camera follows and records the journey made by a truck transporting a prefabricated house along side roads.

2000

Serigraph edition of a photograph of the wooden model of «l’Unité d’habitation» in the middle of the forest.
Serigraph edition, 170 x 124 cm. 70 exemplars.

20 of each used in the intervention in several advertising panels (bus shelters and billboards) in Mataró, Other 20 used in the intervention several advertising panels (bus shelters and billboards) in Banyoles.

An architect’s model always stands for a proposal for the future, a promise, a wish, the representation of an idea built to scale which one day will become a tangible place that is both real and liveable.

In Domestic the model of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation is featured, this emblematic building from the modern movement, this perfect place for dwelling with the promise of a better life for the lower classes left abandoned in the middle of a forest; weeds have begun to smother the building.

The sign is eloquent: the Unité, a modern architectural paradigm for living happily in the world, devised as a universal solution based on a number of excessively predetermined and utopic suppositions which has now become a simple derelict building. The proposition presented thus expresses a dual intention: a game that subverts the illusory pretensions of modernity, in which an abandoned, vulnerable wooden house takes the place of dreams of building a solid foundation in the world, yet one which is only renderings and photo-montages of the new urban planning projects, just like in the colourful advertisements that feature models, that is, an idealised representation of what perhaps one day might be, will be.

Benifallet, 2000
Curated by Betty Bui and Gilles Coudert.

In the context of the project Segona Estació

The Benifallet train station in Tarragona; far from the village, on the other side of the river, difficult to get to, is now a strange place, a ruin of progress, an undefined territory. The trees grow on the rails, nobody waits for the train. Building a bus shelter here, another «station», a small building, the minimum expression of a house, a place where one can seek shelter from the sun or the rain, a place where one may sit and wait. The space usually reserved for advertising remains empty, there is only a strip of lighting; at night it lights up the forest.

A Place, 1999

“A Place” is an installation which is made to look like a possible single room; a bed, a chair, a book shelf and a “model piece of furniture” which recreates the “Unité d’Habitation” and has made by Le Corbusier in the forties, a paradigm of the attempt to create a new style of live dwelling, both individually and collectively. Some years before Le Corbusier built the “Unité”, he had been to the Soviets Union and met the radical architects who proposed in that time to build large collective dwelling buildings were the inhabitants only owned their single bed and all the other things were collective. In this project I tried to put in the same level the fascination and contradictions of all of these ideas and projects produced on me. After that, I used this “Unité model piece of furniture” for different projects, for example, in one exhibition I put the model in the gallery storage and it was suggested to the public to walk into the gallery backstage.

*The piece belongs to the Josep M. Civit Collection.

Barcelona, 1998

An production of Fundació “La Caixa” for the Sala Montcada, curated by Martí Peran

The installation called 24 hours of artificial light (1998) recreates a full scale model of a room in the hospital for patients suffering from tuberculosis in Paimio, Finland —made by Alvar Aalto at the beginning of the thirties, considered to be a perfect example due to its open relationship with the natural elements —; which was transformed into a large wooden model with no windows, where the beds and the sanitary units become monochrome sculptures with no links to their original use, useless objects, over lighted due to the blinding presence of artificial light. This piece has been set up in different places: The Montcada Hall in Barcelona, at the old chapel of Roser in Lleida (now an exhibition room), inside the hospital of Mataró or in Fabra i Coats.

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Photography
Diptych 50 x 140 cm.
Edition of 3
1998

* the edition 1 / 3 belongs to the Reus City Council Contemporary Art Collection

The Face of Another
Montesquiu, Barcelona, 1994

Wooden architecture installed in the middle of the forest within the natural park of Castell de Montesquiu.
260 x 488 x 122 cm.

The name of the project is taken from the title of the novel written by Japanese author Kobo Abe.