Sandra Calvo
Architecture without Architects
Architecture without architects (2011-2014) is an artistic and political practice that portrays the informalized city as a visual essay. It is a collaborative project that deconstructs the notion of home, which goes from being a hard and solid concrete structure to what it really is: a fragile concept, in flux, unstable and of enormous plasticity. Self-construction is explored here as a practice, a knowledge acquired through experience and intuition, which allows communities to build their own houses without following a hierarchical model and without the need for any architect.
The critical incident of Architecture without architects is the proposal of an architectural sculptural simulation to a family from Ciudad Bolívar, Colombia. The construction of a house of threads, an agora, an assembly. Together with the family, a code was devised: the consensual spaces were drawn with black thread; with red the spaces in discord. The result is a real-scale walkable three-dimensional drawing that suggests the location and size of each part of the planned house: openings that will be doors or windows, brick walls, a staircase ... A device that facilitates the negotiation of antagonistic positions. A concrete and intangible, poetic and utilitarian sculpture. The house is presented as a flexible sculpture that encourages various readings capable of going beyond the practical purpose of architectural projection.
Q & A between Sandra Calvo and Miguel Monroy
MM: What was your approach in regards to working with the family? What did it mean that an outsider was inserted into the discussion of the disputed spaces?
SC: The first phase consisted of the building of trust to gain knowledge of the story of the lives and daily activities of the people. On the portrait level, I met with the group and painted their activities. I followed their work processes in the method of ‘social chronicle' that was born in the XIX and XX centuries. I based my work on a wide array of tools ranging from novels in the costumbrista traditions, portraits of social classes, cinema, anthropology, documentary and ethnography.
In this phase, the house foundations were made with the participation of the familial inhabitants as well as family, friends and neighbors. This was the most important part of construction and is known as "casting the slab or raising the cross". It is the foundational moment in which the temporary sheets or canvases that have served as a roof are removed and replaced by a solid concrete plate. This gave the house the characteristic of stability, of belonging, of being a “fixed” settlement.
As part of this process, I proposed to the family to renovate the brick walls to create a more stable foundation using new bricks. There was push back because some of the original bricks had been manufactured by the family’s grandmother using a home oven and a technique little used today. These bricks proved to be sentimental, utilitarian and of great value to the family. They believed that the bricks were proof that both the land and house belonged to their family for many years. Moreover, they were archaeological evidence of the right to reside and build on the soil.
As we progressed, a deeper understanding and commitment to the project emerged. The participants became more involved with the project so I was able to film over and over again. They were enthusiastic and participatory; we talked a lot about the subjects and the contents of the documentary. It was then that I was able to contextualize the house and made it a character: the house as a workshop or factory where structures are produced; the house that has five degree water for bathing; the house with almost zero natural light; the house with wind that filters through the voids where bricks are laid; the house with cold and uneven ground; the house with mounds of gravel, sand, wire, and stones that are waiting to be reused.
Community work is never neutral, it is never objective, and it is always fraught with conflict. When there is no cathartic element that questions both the position and notion of otherness, you have to distrust the safety zone that is created, the anesthetized locus. In Architecture without Architects, the collaboration between family members showed the tension within the community as it related to decisions about the division and use of space.
Some of the biggest challenges of working with communities is developing mutual honesty, to affect and be affected, taking responsibility and accepting the consequences that derive from that collaboration. To the extent that you really get involved in a project, collaboration never ends, it transforms, it becomes memory, it becomes reflection and possibility.
There is a main element in this type of work called the trust building process, which has to do with perseverance and empathy. Collaboration arises from affectivity, but this affectivity is not always harmonious or consensus-generating. Collaborating means getting involved, positioning yourself, affirming yourself, and taking a position when there is conflict and disagreement.
It is not about participating but about positioning. Without a priori condition, but also without objectivity. It is precisely what Marina Garcés calls "honesty with reality", an honest art that enters the scene, that is not banal or objective, that is confrontational, that violates reality and that is immersed in the problems of its time.
MM: How do you think the piece changed by being on the site and then by displaying it in the museum? What did you lose and what did you gain from this displacement?
SC: The site / non-site duality rejects a formalist and static vision of art. The ASA (Architecture without Architects) project originates from the need to create from a problematic and tense space, and to become visible in public spaces and exhibitions.
The site is the locus of conflict and negotiation. It is the house of thread in Ciudad Bolívar. It is a scene of struggle and collaboration that functions as a point of catharsis in which work connects with the community.
The non-site is the documentary expanded within the museum space. It is a space for dialogue and socialization with a wider audience and an extension that allows the viewer to connect with the self-built house, its inhabitants and the problems of informal housing. A fragmentary or spatialized documentary, where architecture becomes the very support of the moving image: walls, stairs, arches, windows and doors are also screens. The documentary unfolds both in its sensory and narrative aspects, the viewer participates in a walkable and three-dimensional cinema. Scenes that overflow from the screen to reinterpret the traditional. Image-time expands, the image progressively fades, seems to float, multiplies like a kaleidoscope and finally falls apart.
Devices made with materials from the world of self-construction, which refer to the memories and histories of these sites. For example, a screen simulates a slab on the floor, this slab is composed of gravel, cement and sand. The viewer who passes this screen raises dust and little by little people carry the screen on their feet.
The in-situ yarn house is ephemeral in nature and serves to project. Its main purpose is to serve as a guide to solid construction. Within the museum space (non-site) the architectural plan ceases to be a projection, it becomes a sculpture. A dialogic and participatory installation that accounts for the ties that were generated between family, friends and neighbors during the project. The string structure in the museum's white cube rises as a tribute to the continuous process of projection that happens in the head and in the conversations of its tenants, while they inhabit and build the place.
MM: How do the narratives of the videos compare to the presence of the installation?
SC: In the museographic space, the film unfolds as an expanded documentary. An expansion of the single-channel projection and conventional narrative. It makes use of various modalities to create a physical atmosphere that facilitates the participation of the viewer and unifies different disciplines such as architecture, interactivity, hypertextuality and installation. The expanded documentary (video installation, installation, archive) unfolds both in its sensory and narrative aspects. The viewer participates in a passable, fragmented and three-dimensional film.
The film is projected in multi-channel video installations on glass, wood and concrete panels. The device is an analogy of the resistance in which the projected image gradually fades. It resists being shown, floats on glass, unfolds, repeats itself, and fragments. The fragments touch and separate; the deconstruction of the ephemeral.
This is a type of cinema focused on interaction. Contrary to the idea of a passive cinema, this is a cinema that invites participation. The audience here is not a recipient, but as a participant in the space. An audience in continuous dialogue and intervention with the film.
The expanded documentary is an explosion (or extension) of the cinematographic material towards a more intense or sensory wide experience. Towards the conjunction of space, image and sound, where it is not only a matter of exalting the image as a center but of increasing or expanding an idea; a physical and mental state within a space, which in turn is a referential of what it is seen or heard.