450 W 42
single channel video, color, silent, 2006, 13'33"
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An isolated landscape in the heart of Manhattan, on 42nd Street, is revealed through the footsteps of a walking subject who enters the area illegally. The camera follows the character through hills, esplanades and lagoons.
"..the changeover to a new century… a new millennium.. from the window of my studio I saw the buildings give way under the pressure of the excavators…a theatre, an apartment building, a public building… then a desert was born, a carefully delimited desert in the heart of the city: a whole city block, on 42nd Street, a few steps from Times Square. Luxury condominiums popped up everywhere, the incipient New York Times building was plastered with photographs of its own construction. Meanwhile, the secret desert, that desert enclosed by a blue painted hermetic wooden fence, stopped being a desert when a lagoon appeared after the first rains… I heard rumors that they were going to build a hotel.. meanwhile, somebody planted a tomato plant and waits for its juicy fruits to emerge from the rubble. I think about that undefined moment in the history of a place, when it is barren, open to questioning. I think about exercising a self-proclaimed sovereignty over this territory, even if it is just for a few minutes. I think about ignoring artificial, judicial, legal and property demarcations and, for little a while, being able to follow the inherent continuity involved in walking 30 steps towards the adjoining space, taking advantage of the fact that I fit under the fence..."
thanks to Martin Murphy
who agreed to work the camera,
without prior notice and rather rigid instructions.
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Exhibitions
Jersey City Museum, New Jersey, US
Smack Mellon, New York, US
Instituto Cervantes, Beijing, China
Unplanned, Superfront, Los Angeles, CA.
Publications, reviews and texts
Review by Lori Cole, Artforum.
Visión:f(icción) exhibition catalog
Deseo de (no) ser arquitecto, a text by Marti Peran
The Architectural Agonism of the Unplanned, a Play in Ten Acts by Cristina Goberna, Domus, 2010
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