18th March 2005 / Institutional Prosthesis. Temporary intervention.
It is a production by Santiago Cirugeda in close collaboration with the EACC, and is the result of a joint reflection on the new uses and possibilities of an art centre. Access to this new architectural complex is independent of the rest of the centre’s facilities. These spaces, which have been jokingly christened the fat and the skinny, are covered by a skin of black plastic cassettes that are usually used as concrete modules, each of them pierced by four metal rods. The front of these habitable cells are glazed over their entire surface, which makes them public or semi-public spaces depending on the use and will of their occupants. The optical perception of the prosthesis, as if it were a vibrant organic structure, is given by a principle of economy and displacement with respect to the materials that make it up. This skin of industrial and asetched volumes, almost handmade, can also be read as an ironic commentary on the (ab)use of high-tech in much of today’s architectural production.
Although it is a temporary intervention, its construction and staging are close to the idea of architecture and, therefore, make its author an architect. Through an architectural vocabulary that is strident with the urban context that surrounds it, this intervention, which parasitizes the most public façade of the pre-existing building, constitutes a true declaration of intentions on the role and responsibilities of the museum institution. Understanding the city as a definitive framework for action – not only because of its capacities as a possible scenario in which to intervene but above all because it is constituted as a complex network of situations, of confluences and misunderstandings, of social energy in short – this prosthesis or constructed parasite represents not only an anteroom for meeting and negotiation but also a space of resistance. Juan de Nieves, artistic director of the Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castellón, 2005.
