Jordi Colomer’s work, Anarchitekton, 2002–2004, introduces the viewer into a hermetic space that is entirely painted red. The space is illuminated by four video works projected onto diagonally positioned screens, which cut off the four corners of the room. These works each feature a figure carrying an architectural model against a different urban landscape (the models are of buildings in Barcelona, Bucharest, Brasilia and Osaka, and the works were filmed, respectively, in these cities). Each model is composed of roughly hewn cardboard, and is displayed in relation to the architectural original it represents. Due to the changing camera angles, the relational scale between the building and the model changes continuously, so that at times the model appears larger than the building it represents. The figure carrying the model marches, speeds up, runs, stops, displays itself and the model it is holding – all of this without any clear or visible purpose.
In normative building processes, the building of a model precedes the construction of the actual building. In the situations captured in Colomer’s work, by contrast, it is unclear what preceded what, and what represents what: the model or the building? Reality or the work of art? Is this a statement about the precedence of the simulacrum over the real? Or is this a strange one-person demonstration against something? What is the context of this action?
The performative action undertaken in each of these video works amounts to a protest against accepted social norms, which is given expression through the fact that some of the models depict intermediate construction states compatible with the incomplete state of the actual buildings. This act of protest is also expressed through the strange, senseless behavior of the figure – which seems to be darting back and forth according to an inner rhythm, possibly attempting to say something. The title of the work – which combines the terms ”anarchy” and ”architecture” – echoes its subversive quality.
Colmer’s work seems to efface the fundamental difference between officially celebrated buildings of the kind created by Richard Niemeyer in Brasilia (the first city ever to be entirely built according to a preexisting architectural plan), and between project buildings of the kind that typically appear on the margins of cities. In doing so, it poses a fundamental question concerning the nature of the relations between buildings and the people that surround and inhabit them.
The examination of the relationship between reality and its representation – one of the central axes of this exhibition – is given expression in this work both formally and thematically: architecture is transformed into a kind of sculpture, which in turn becomes a video work integrated into an installation -- in which the viewers lower themselves into children’s chairs. They view a work that challenges – and to a certain degree
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