From June 6 to July 10, 2022

Sala Abierta is an intangible space that is part of the MAZ galleries.
*Essay on ruin *, 2012
Video 3’ 56”

Albert Speer, the architect that Hitler placed in charge of most of the important building projects of the Third Reich, habitually made drawings of the future ruins of his own buildings. Speer claimed, with reason, that the real potential of architecture resides in the evocative force of its future ruin or destruction. And in order to justify this argument, he recalled monumental structures of the past, the remains of civilizations such as the Roman, Greek and Egyptian ones.

Luis Urculo’s works deal with this fall from power and its manifestation on the basis of monumental architecture. Using compositions of domestic objects, arranged according to the neoclassical ideal, he depicts the collapse and breakdown of the symbols of a stable and eternal Europe, the celebration of failure as an aesthetic act. At the same time,  Úrculo portrays the very concept of collapse or destruction at a precise moment in a person’s life.

Iván López Munuera explains: “A cult to decline, as Andreas Huyssen points out, has sprung from one of the greatest obsessions of contemporary times. Because decline or ruin begs for a place that is charged with nostalgia; [it is] a call to a past that no longer exists, that questions the present from a position that ponders not only the past, but also the uncertainty to come.”

Here, through constructions carried out with objects that are considered “cadavers”. he not only investigates the possible structures and acts of decline, but also the spectator’s perception and interpretation of them. These are quick succint actions that imply the descending movement of the compositions – fabrics that unfold to reveal their structures and fall in a strange choreography: detailed maps atlases of detritus, sticks, debris and rubble, arches of triumph and podiums– until reaching their formal ruin / rupture.

As Ivan López Munuera underlined, “the images that  Úrculo creates in his Essay on Decline do not recall specific places, but rather invokes sensations; they do not spawn a desire to return to earlier times, but instead recall them. Through his works,he establishes a platform from which one can conceive and mold the futures for which we wish, even invent new and exciting pasts.

Reconstructions

This work studies the position/role of the observer and how by nature we need to understand the world and all that surround us, by direct explanations or in case of lack of this information the use of interpretations to create maps of intellection.

The video is the last piece of the project ‘Reconstructions’, where a series of images in sets of 2 (dyptic) play an open dialogue with the spectator, where the left image is always shown as an autopsy organized by numbers, working as a path of reading by linking numbers and details to create an understanding, a possible meaning, but on the right side, a notation/drawing/document explains the image as a placard, opening a new possibility of reading. Fiction and reality are placed as a balance which need to be reviewed endlessly.

Here a collection of actions are placed one after the other, without direct explanations, just as visual landscapes, open to be translated by the viewer, as the Rorschach test which uses interpretation of ambiguous designs to assess an individual’s personality and well as the psychoanalytic concept of object relations.

This work uses two clear references, anthropology and criminology, and how this fields work inventing the void parts or fragments of a timeline as future/past elements, placing the action in a transitional state of time and meaning.

Luis Úrculo

Lives and works between Madrid and Mexico City

His practice takes anthropology, archeology and criminology as a main references of phenomenology to create lines of investigation based on reconstructions, timelines, interpretations, uncertain materialities, imprecise descriptions, or ambiguities.

Fiction, and representation of diverse domestic geographies have been the language and scenarios used to create diverse video works, using amateur choreographies with objects to represent this ideas.

His latest investigations are based on the idea of ‘karaoke’,
(or working with absence of information), to create new bodies of work within those missing parts, images or explanations. Perform a line of complicity with the viewer, who builds interpretations or reconstructions out of this pieces, as tourists, archeologist, or simple karaoke singers in a bar.

Urculo is also interested on a redefinition of the possible tools, procedures and formats within architecture. Mainly is an investigation focused on the representation and the narrative of the ‘invisible’ that defines the space. A work not so directly related with the gravity and weight, a value which has been a main unit to measure construction and its media impact on the last decades.

www.luisurculo.com