por fuera / from the outside...
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Bonadies & Olavarría
La Torre vista desde Los Caobos
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Appearances Are Not Deceptive
By Félix Suazo
By Félix Suazo
In 1990 building began on the Centro Financiero Confianzas Tower, one of the highest buildings in Caracas at 195 meters and 45 floors high. However, the Tower was left unfinished in 1994 amid a serious banking crisis that sent its owners into bankruptcy. Since that time, the building ‐‐ also known as David's Tower, in an allusion to its owner David Brillembourg ‐‐ was taken over by the State institution Fondo de Garantía de Depósitos y Protección Bancaria (Fogade)1. In October 2007, a group of homeless families invaded the building2, and in June 2009 they formed the cooperative entitled Cooperativa Cacique Venezuela R.L.3, which was run by a character nicknamed El Niño.
Government authorities have maintained a doubly ambiguous position towards the future administration of the Tower4, as well as regards to the inhabitants who live in it illegally, because they have neither taken any steps to evict the squatters, nor to guarantee them with a more comfortable dwelling. In fact, the Venezuelan State's housing plans are still highly deficient, as some 2,500,000 homes are needed to cover demand, according to official figures from the National Statistics Institute (INE, in Spanish)5.
Despite its monumental height and downtown location, the striking David's Tower ‐‐ which "for now"6 is run by El Niño ‐‐ represents a further empty space on Caracas' irregular urban topography. At only 60 per cent completed and with no elevators or basic services installed, the building has become a sort of "luxury shanty", whose function and legal status remain hazy as it is put to a use that it was not designed for. After featuring as a symbol of a corporative empire, the towering structure that faces the public is now an emblem of precariousness and abandonment.
That the current inhabitants' hopes for a place to live are hinged upon this failure confronts us the repeatedly anomalous behavior that affects all levels of social and productive activity in Venezuela. Other Caracas buildings that were of similar note at their time, such as the Helicoide, the Humboldt Hotel or, more recently, the Sambil shopping center in La Candelaria, were unable to fulfill their original purpose and have also ended up being governed by the successive transfer of their property documents and failed rehabilitation projects. In each of these cases ‐‐ as well as with David's Tower ‐‐ institutional inefficiency is combined with public amnesia.
Except for those that live there, few people know what happens inside the Tower, how the inhabitants organize their daily lives, or where they cook, wash and sleep. From the outside, however, the contrast between the imposing structure and its deteriorated walls is quite apparent. Many of the windows that covered the upper floors have been broken, whilst the area that was to be used as a mezzanine has been divided up by balconies and unrendered red brick walls, drapes and zinc sheets, which are typically used in informal architecture.
Government authorities have maintained a doubly ambiguous position towards the future administration of the Tower4, as well as regards to the inhabitants who live in it illegally, because they have neither taken any steps to evict the squatters, nor to guarantee them with a more comfortable dwelling. In fact, the Venezuelan State's housing plans are still highly deficient, as some 2,500,000 homes are needed to cover demand, according to official figures from the National Statistics Institute (INE, in Spanish)5.
Despite its monumental height and downtown location, the striking David's Tower ‐‐ which "for now"6 is run by El Niño ‐‐ represents a further empty space on Caracas' irregular urban topography. At only 60 per cent completed and with no elevators or basic services installed, the building has become a sort of "luxury shanty", whose function and legal status remain hazy as it is put to a use that it was not designed for. After featuring as a symbol of a corporative empire, the towering structure that faces the public is now an emblem of precariousness and abandonment.
That the current inhabitants' hopes for a place to live are hinged upon this failure confronts us the repeatedly anomalous behavior that affects all levels of social and productive activity in Venezuela. Other Caracas buildings that were of similar note at their time, such as the Helicoide, the Humboldt Hotel or, more recently, the Sambil shopping center in La Candelaria, were unable to fulfill their original purpose and have also ended up being governed by the successive transfer of their property documents and failed rehabilitation projects. In each of these cases ‐‐ as well as with David's Tower ‐‐ institutional inefficiency is combined with public amnesia.
Except for those that live there, few people know what happens inside the Tower, how the inhabitants organize their daily lives, or where they cook, wash and sleep. From the outside, however, the contrast between the imposing structure and its deteriorated walls is quite apparent. Many of the windows that covered the upper floors have been broken, whilst the area that was to be used as a mezzanine has been divided up by balconies and unrendered red brick walls, drapes and zinc sheets, which are typically used in informal architecture.
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Bonadies & Olavarría
La Torre de David (fachada Este)
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Juan José Olavarría (Valencia, 1969) and Ángela Bonadies (Caracas, 1970) approach this phenomenon by deconstructing the building's visible elements and confronting them with their potential meaning in public space. They have deduced an overriding grid from the building's facade, which connects it to a vernacular modernity based on geometry and modular structures. They then explore the multiplication of this element through drawings, screen prints, altered posters and three‐dimensional works in which they signal the paradoxes that have resulted from developmentalism.
Working closely with one of the main issues in his work, Olavarría deals with the relationship between image and history. On this occasion, the artist contrasts three ways of perceiving the building. Firstly, in an isometric drawing on a large‐scale raw canvas, the structure becomes stands out against an empty landscape, whose surroundings have disappeared. There is nothing there, except the weightless outline of Our Lady of Caracas, which he appropriates from an anonymous painting from the end of the eighteenth century in which the Virgin is represented as the city's protector. The present‐day city, like the Caracas of yesteryear, seeks the Virgin's favor in the face of destruction, whether manifested in natural disasters or through human actions.
The second means of perceiving the Tower that Olavarría deploys is a three‐dimensional clay model of the building, which imitates the technique used by amateur artisans when they sculpt souvenirs of churches or village cottages to sell to tourists. This is evidently a strategy that seeks to emulate the global production and commercialization of miniature replicas of objects and monuments that are acquired by travelers to remind them of the places they have visited.
Working closely with one of the main issues in his work, Olavarría deals with the relationship between image and history. On this occasion, the artist contrasts three ways of perceiving the building. Firstly, in an isometric drawing on a large‐scale raw canvas, the structure becomes stands out against an empty landscape, whose surroundings have disappeared. There is nothing there, except the weightless outline of Our Lady of Caracas, which he appropriates from an anonymous painting from the end of the eighteenth century in which the Virgin is represented as the city's protector. The present‐day city, like the Caracas of yesteryear, seeks the Virgin's favor in the face of destruction, whether manifested in natural disasters or through human actions.
The second means of perceiving the Tower that Olavarría deploys is a three‐dimensional clay model of the building, which imitates the technique used by amateur artisans when they sculpt souvenirs of churches or village cottages to sell to tourists. This is evidently a strategy that seeks to emulate the global production and commercialization of miniature replicas of objects and monuments that are acquired by travelers to remind them of the places they have visited.
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Bonadies & Olavarría
La Torre de David.
Terracota. 2011
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The third approach to the Tower in Olavarría's work is found in his sequence of ink drawings on paper of the Tower's orthogonal western facade. They are ordered consecutively in a series to sketch out a parable that goes from a sterile geometry to a naturalist precision. Clotheslines, bits of wood, curtains, buckets, and unfinished walls break with the formal homogeneity of the structure and challenge the precepts upon which it was built in order to create an allegory of the process of material and symbolic corrosion of the modern grid.
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| Bonadies & Olavarría Estudio fachada Este Tinta sobre papel 36 x 48 cm |
In Bonadies' case, the grid also breaks free and spills out onto different formats that can be easily reproduced, such as screen prints and institutional posters, which were originally created to disseminate the collection of the Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas. The superimposition of one apparently unrelated image onto another emphasizes a promiscuous reality that refuses to acknowledge the past origin of its current inefficiency. In effect, just as with David's Tower, the national museums have become dis‐functional due to the mismanagement of official policies. In both cases, contingent factors prevented them from properly carrying out the original activity for which they were planned.
Bonadies confronts the drama of these events in another series of works using photographs that she appropriates and alters to present a parodic vision of the situation. In one of them, an image of the building intact is hit by lightning; in another, the rackety structure takes on a bucolic appearance as it rises from a city park, and in a third the Tower appears as a lighthouse whose foundations sink into a tiny island. In this group of works, the screen print inspired by a
japanese poster from the 1930s also stands out, in which Mr Brillembourg poses as an advertising star and invites inhabitants and passersby to take exercise going up the unfinished building's staircases.
japanese poster from the 1930s also stands out, in which Mr Brillembourg poses as an advertising star and invites inhabitants and passersby to take exercise going up the unfinished building's staircases.
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Bonadies & Olavarría
La Torre de David. Ejercita - sube - escala
Serigrafía 2010
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Finally, Bonadies' ironic strategy can be summarized in a poster that is based on a public declaration signed by various Parisian intellectuals protesting against the "useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower". The piece, produced together with Miguel Murugarren, extrapolates the situation to present‐day Caracas, situating David's Tower as the target of the recriminations "in the name of unappreciated Venezuelan taste".
In short, Bonadies and Olavarría's work shows a clear engagement with its context, not only in the critical recreation of anecdotal aspects and sometimes pintoresque elements the Tower, but also in their critical references to its ideological and cultural foundations. In terms of the practice of creative research, The Tower from the outside (the project's sub‐title) is only a preliminary approach to a problem of greater complexity and breadth, which involves economic, political, legal and social factors. Nevertheless, the exploration of the external parts of the ill‐fated building has already provided proof enough that at times we must accept that appearances are not deceptive.
In short, Bonadies and Olavarría's work shows a clear engagement with its context, not only in the critical recreation of anecdotal aspects and sometimes pintoresque elements the Tower, but also in their critical references to its ideological and cultural foundations. In terms of the practice of creative research, The Tower from the outside (the project's sub‐title) is only a preliminary approach to a problem of greater complexity and breadth, which involves economic, political, legal and social factors. Nevertheless, the exploration of the external parts of the ill‐fated building has already provided proof enough that at times we must accept that appearances are not deceptive.
Caracas, November 2010
1 Cfr. Gerardo Hernández Dávila. 'La Torre de David', El Universal, Caracas, Saturday 1 September 2007
2 Cfr. '200 familias invadieron torre bancaria de Fogade', URL: www.sociedadcivilvenezuela.com. Published 31 October 2007
3 Cfr. Nancy Velasco, 'Se consolida invasión de la torre de David tras dos años y medio', El Universal, Saturday 17 April 2010
4 In 2005 the Metropolitan Mayor's Office (Alcaldía Metropolitana in Spanish) made plans to move certain municipal offices and ministries to the Tower.
5 Cfr. www.gobiernoenlinea.gob.ve. Accessed 15 February 2010
6 Translator's note: this phrase is renowned in Venezuela as now president Hugo Chávez famously uttered it following the failure "for now" of his 1992 coup attempt.
FELIX SUAZO (La Habana, 1966) graduated in 1990 from Instituto Superior de Arte de la Habana (ISA) with a B.A. degree in Sculpture. Between October 2002 and February 2003 he studied in Universidad de Valladolid, España earning his Masters in Museum Studies with a Fundacion Carolina scholarship. Living in Venezuela since 1991, he has practiced as professor, art critic, researcher and curator. Between 1997 and 2003 he was a researcher at the Galería de Arte Nacional. He was also a researcher at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas (MAC) between 2004 and 2008. Nowadays, Suazo is the Exhibitions and Publications Coordinator at Periférico Caracas / Arte Contemporáneo as well as professor at Universidad Nacional Experimental de las Artes (UNEARTE) in Caracas, Venezuela. He is a frequent collaborator for local and international publications such as Artnexus and Arte al Día. In 2005, Fundación de Arte Emergente published his book “A diestra y siniestra. Comentarios sobre arte y política”.
Las apariencias no engañan
Por Félix Suazo
La torre del Centro Financiero Confinanzas, una de las más altas de Caracas con 195 metros de altura y 45 pisos, se comenzó a construir en 1990, quedando inconclusa en 1994, fecha en que se produjo una fuerte crisis bancaria que llevó a sus propietarios a la quiebra. Desde entonces, la edificación - también conocida como La torre de David en alusión a David Brillembourg - pasó a manos del Fondo de Garantía de Depósitos y Protección Bancaria (Fogade)[1]. En octubre de 2007 un grupo de familias sin vivienda invadieron el lugar[2], agrupándose desde junio del 2009 en la Cooperativa Cacique Venezuela, R.L.[3], bajo la conducción de un personaje apodado El Niño.
Las autoridades gubernamentales han mantenido una postura doblemente ambigua, tanto en relación con el destino administrativo de la torre[4], como respecto a los inquilinos que la habitan ilegalmente, pues en la práctica no se ejercen acciones para desalojar a los invasores ni tampoco se les garantiza una morada confortable. De hecho, los planes de vivienda del Estado venezolano siguen siendo altamente deficitarios, requiriéndose alrededor de 2 millones 500 mil viviendas para cubrir la demanda, según cifras oficiales del Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (INE) [5].
Bonadies & Olavarría
La Torre de David.
Tierras y tinta de caraotas sobre tela
2011
Pese a su altura monumental y céntrica ubicación, la descollante Torre de David –“por ahora” en manos de El Niño- es como un vacío más en la irregular topografía urbana de Caracas. Apenas con el 60 porciento de su ejecución final, sin ascensores ni servicios básicos instalados, el edificio se ha convertido en una especie de “rancho de lujo”, donde convergen la indeterminación funcional y jurídica de un espacio arquitectónico destinado a un uso diferente de aquel para el cual fue concebido. Después de figurar como el símbolo de un emporio corporativo, la empinada estructura arquitectónica funge ante la mirada pública como el emblema de la precariedad y el abandono.
Sobre ese fracaso se erige la esperanza habitacional de sus ocupantes actuales, hecho que nos coloca ante la reiteración de un comportamiento anómalo que se manifiesta en todos los niveles de la actividad social y productiva del país. Otros edificios de similar relevancia en su momento como El Helicoide, el Hotel Humboldt o, más recientemente, el Sambil de La Candelaria, todos en Caracas, quedaron incapacitados para cumplir con su propósito original, quedando a expensas de sucesivos traspasos de propiedad y rehabilitaciones fallidas. En todos estos casos –como en el de la Torre de David- se cruzan la ineficiencia institucional y la amnesia pública.
Exceptuando a los pisatarios del lugar, pocos saben qué ocurre en el interior de la torre, cómo organizan su cotidianidad los inquilinos o dónde cocinan, se asean y duermen. Desde el exterior, sin embargo, se advierte el contraste entre la imponente estructura y el deterioro de sus fachadas. Muchos de los vidrios que recubrían los pisos superiores se han quebrado, mientras el área que sería destinada a la mezzanina ha sido demarcada con balcones y paredes de ladrillo sin frisar, lonas y planchas de zinc, a la usanza de la arquitectura popular.
Juan José Olavarría (Valencia, 1969) y Ángela Bonadies (Caracas, 1970) se plantean un acercamiento a este fenómeno deconstruyendo los elementos visibles del edificio y confrontándolos a su significado potencial de cara al espacio público. De la fachada han deducido la retícula matricial que conecta a esta edificación con la modernidad vernácula, ceñida a la geometría y las estructuras modulares. A partir de allí exploran la multiplicación de este elemento en dibujos, serigrafías, afiches intervenidos y piezas tridimensionales en los que se advierten las paradójicas consecuencias del programa desarrollista.
Muy cercano a la que ha sido la principal divisa de su trabajo, Olavarría plantea la relación entre imagen e historia. En esta oportunidad el artista contrapone tres maneras de percibir el edificio. La primera, en un dibujo isométrico sobre una tela cruda de gran formato en la cual se realza el protagonismo de la estructura sobre un paisaje vacío donde ha desaparecido el entorno. No hay nada allí, excepto el contorno ingrávido de Nuestra Señora de Caracas, imagen apropiada de una pintura anónima de finales del siglo XVIII en la que la Virgen es representada como protectora de la ciudad. La urbe actual, como la Caracas de antaño, invoca el favor mariano ante el acecho de los impulsos destructivos, ya sea por desastres naturales o debido a la intervención de las acciones humanas.
La segunda modalidad perceptiva empleada por Olavarría, toma cuerpo a través de un modelo tridimensional de la edificación realizado en arcilla, siguiendo un procedimiento similar al que utilizan los artesanos populares cuando modelan suvenires de las iglesias y “casitas de pueblo” para ofrecerlos a los turistas. Esta, por cierto, es una estrategia que emula la producción y comercialización a escala global de réplicas en miniatura de objetos y monumentos que son adquiridos por los viajeros como recuerdo de los lugares visitados.
La tercera perspectiva que encarna el trabajo de Olavarría se concreta a partir de una secuencia ortogonal de la fachada oeste de la torre. Se trata de un conjunto de dibujos en tinta sobre papel, cuya colocación de manera consecutiva traza una parábola que va de la asepsia geométrica a la exactitud naturalista. Tendederos, trozos de madera, cortinas, tobos y paredes sin terminar, rompen la homogeneidad formal de la estructura y desafían sus preceptos constructivos, alegorizando el proceso de corrosión material y simbólica de la retícula moderna.
En el caso de Bonadies, la retícula también se independiza y trasvierte sobre distintos soportes de reproducción múltiple como serigrafías y afiches institucionales, originalmente concebidos con la intención de divulgar el patrimonio del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas. La superposición de dos imágenes aparentemente ajenas, pone el énfasis en una realidad promiscua que se niega a reconocer el origen pretérito de su ineficacia actual. En efecto, tanto los museos nacionales como la Torre de David, se han convertido en aparatos disfuncionales a consecuencia del mal manejo de las políticas oficiales. En ambos casos, la acción de factores contingentes ha impedido el pleno desempeño de la actividad para la cual fueron creados.
Bonadies confronta la dramaticidad de estos hechos en otra serie de trabajos en los cuales emplea fotografías apropiadas y manipuladas para ofrecer una visión paródica de la situación. En una de ellas, la impoluta imagen del edificio es tocada por un rayo; en otra la estructura desvencijada se levanta bucólicamente en medio de un parque urbano y en una tercera la torre es como un faro que hunde sus cimientos en una pequeña isla. En el conjunto también destaca una pieza serigráfica inspirada en un poster japonés de los años treinta donde el señor Brillemburg adopta la pose de un ídolo publicitario e invita a los inquilinos y transeúntes a ejercitarse subiendo las escaleras del edificio trunco.
Finalmente, la estrategia irónica de Bonadies se resume en un cartel, basado en una proclama suscrita por varios intelectuales parisinos en contra de la “inútil y monstruosa Torre Eiffel”. La pieza, realizada en colaboración con Miguel Murugarren, extrapola la situación a la Caracas actual, colocando La Torre de David como blanco recriminatorio “en nombre del gusto venezolano mal apreciado”
En resumidas cuentas, las propuestas de Bonadies y Olavarría revelan una clara articulación contextual que no sólo recrea de forma crítica los aspectos anecdóticos y en ocasiones pintorescos relacionados con su objeto de interés, sino que también se remiten críticamente a sus fundamentos ideológicos y culturales. En cuanto práctica de indagación creativa, es sólo una aproximación preliminar a un problema de mayor complejidad y alcance que involucra factores económicos, políticos, legales y de índole social. Sin embargo, ya en esa exploración de la parte externa del malogrado edificio hay suficientes indicios para aceptar que a veces las apariencias no engañan.
Caracas, noviembre de 2010
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[1] Cfr. Gerardo Hernández Dávila. La Torre de David. El Universal, Caracas, sábado 01 de septiembre de 2007
[2] Cfr. 200 familias invadieron torre bancaria de Fogade. En: www.sociedadcivilvenezuela.com. Publicado el 31-10-2007
[3] Cfr. Nancy Velasco. Se consolida invasión de la torre de David tras dos años y medio. El Universal, Caracas, sábado 17 de abril de 2010
[4] En 2005 la Alcaldía Metropolitana propuso ubicar allí ciertas dependencias de la municipalidad y algunos ministerios
[5] Cfr. www.gobiernoenlinea.gob.ve. Consultado el 15 -02-2010
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| Bonadies & Olavarría La Prueba Instalación 110 x 180 x 120 cm |
Postcards from the Brink
By Lisa Blackmore*
In the production of national iconographies, diverse spaces are summarized into a shorthand of symbols, reproduced for posterity and circulated in the image‐world to take the place of their much more complex referents. This process results in what we might call commonplaces ‐ sites that a particular imagined community has in common, and which are subsequently exhibited in commonplace images, visual platitudes of the like found on postcards, T‐shirts, or other paraphernalia from the tourist economy. By this reductive logic, the Eiffel Tower is Paris, the Capitol is Washington, and it would be inconceivable to imagine Sydney without conjuring up an image of the Opera House. As space becomes image, place becomes icon, and something appearing to be an identity emerges, as apparently solid as the buildings that are supposed to epitomize it.
With their project David's Tower (from the outside), artists Ángela Bonadies and Juan José Olavarría engage with this same process in the context of Venezuela, where urban space is continually deployed within political projects that posit "definitive" expressions of the cityscape and, by extension, the nation. In David's Tower, however, Bonadies and Olavarría take a different tactic to bombastic discourse. Instead, they play ironically at consecrating a down‐at‐heel skyscraper in central Caracas, by turning a squatter‐filled vertical barrio into a contemporary icon. Tather than articulate a celebratory account of the skyscraper, their insistence on its iconicity interpellates the very interface of national identity and space because their works are suggestive of the relationship between social/national aspirations and spatial arrangements. As Bonadies' poster ironically infers, while the optimistic discourse of economic success that motivated the Tower's construction sought to embody and connote triumphant social ascent, the message she attributes to it today is quite another. The call to "work‐out, go up, climb up" no longer refers to a metaphorical social ladder, but to the 45 flights of stairs that lead some 2000 squatters to their respective, improvised dwellings every day.
In this sense, the artists' approximations to the building are informed by an awareness of the history of its construction. Built during a banking consortium's boom in the 1990s but abandoned after its burnout, the tower's grandiose scale is an additional ex abrupto in Caracas' already complex cityscape. Indeed, while playwright José Ignacio Cabrujas famously described the city as an improvised camp, the idea takes on a literal form in David's Tower as its inhabitants dismantle the building's mirrored facade to make way for the improvised curtains, satellite dishes, and the red brick walls that they hastily erect to fill the void. It is these domestic details that ultimately infiltrate Olavarría's painstaking studies of the building's facade and which reveal the volatile fragility of "David's Tower". In turn, these cracks in the proposed corporate anonymity of the Tower's facade also diagnose a more general malaise: the ardent desire for a "definitive" Caracas, a definitive nation, and the way this project is recurrently undermined by the social, political or economic contingencies that permeate Venezuelan reality. Just as both artists have suggested in previous works, the Venezuela evoked in their representations of David's Tower is characterized by a long list of "proyectos engavetados" ‐‐ truncated promises and project left on a shelf gathering dust. The residual image is a memory of what could have been. In this sense, as Olavarría paints the isolated vision of the Tower onto one of his customary flag‐sized canvases, he engages with national history only to unstitch the very discourse he appears to contribute to. Just as in the artist's representations of other crumbling icons from Venezuela's collective imaginary, the ironic swipe Olavarría takes at this more recent projection of a buoyant and positive Venezuela says one thing: the Tower is nothing but a chimera.
However, perhaps the desire to provide a definitive answer and expression to space will ever be a temptation. In his essays Species of Spaces (1974), Georges Perec posits raw space as trauma, suggesting that space itself is the catalyst for the desire to code and produce it as identity and purpose, leading to the production of 'An idealized scene. Space as reassurance'. In urban planning and architecture the grid ‐‐an "idealized" and "reassuring" space par excellence‐‐ is a recurrent trope, emerging in representations of Caracas and, interestingly, as a common motif in Venezuelan Art. In an anonymous, yet iconographic, painting of the capital city, entitled Nuestra Señora de Caracas (1766), the Virgin hovers above the city, providing an added frame of order literally over and above the grid that delineated the colonial city. However, in both artists' pared‐down reproductions of the Tower's grid, its posited regulation of space is thwarted. The jagged lines of Bonadies' black and white print and Olavarría's meticulous record of the intrusions into the building's homogenous facade frustrate its pretension to visual order. In short, the "reassuring" transformation of space into image is no longer possible: the Tower has exceeded its own premise.
Consequently, it is beyond its original premise that Bonadies' representations of the Tower are situated. In the artist's "postcards", digitally produced photomontages of the Tower are "cloned" in iconic locations and sabotage the relationship between aspiration and image.
By this token, iconography and identity are framed within the apocalyptic, while the hackneyed and repetitive visual code of the souvenir is deployed to ironic and absurd effect. What is more, even though the arrival at a "definitive" Caracas has long been a national project, curiously its success has repeatedly been expressed as the quest to turn the capital into an elsewhere. In the late nineteenth century, it was modeled on Parisian boulevards and grand public buildings, while during the 1940s and 50s Caracas was praised for its similarities to New York, Los Ángeles, and Miami. This crisis of identity is taken to the extreme by Bonadies, as the chameleonic Tower is inserted into multiple elsewheres and entrenched in a web of connotations, all of which are by definition "other".
Ultimately, David's Tower survives only in ironic, mocking, or absurd terms as both artists shift between sacred and profane registers. Olavarría's miniature model of the Tower plays at consecrating it by appealing to the mass‐production of icons that posits heritage as a keyring; while Bonadies takes the theme of social climbing to an absurd extreme as she pictures the Tower ascending to the heavens. The works resulting from this joint project are a caustic contribution to a Venezuelan iconography, a national identity that the artists construct from the disjointed glare of the dismantled mirrors of "David's Tower".
Caracas, November 2010
por dentro / inside...
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| Bonadies & Olavarría Normas del piso |
La Torre – Texto para una instalación de Ángela Bonadies y Juan José Olavarría
La Torre por fuera. La Torre por dentro. Con esta oscilación los artistas Ángela Bonadies y Juan José Olavarría movilizan su exploración de un ícono arquitectónico del paisaje caraqueño. Durante meses los artistas han emprendido una investigación comprometida de la Torre de David, como es apodado este vertiginoso rascacielos a medio terminar. Construida durante el boom financiero de los años noventa, la torre fue abandonada cuando la compañía para la cual iba a servir de sede sucumbió a la bancarrota. Ahora yace como un ex abrupto más en el ya complejo y disparejo urbanismo de Caracas. Desde hace unos años se convirtió en un barrio vertical habitado por familias que invadieron el edificio con el fin de tomar el problema del déficit habitacional en sus propias manos. Arrastrando su historia, la torre se ha vuelto un territorio incongruente, un espacio fracturado cuya tensión radica en la apropiación de una estructura destinada a un fin específico, que terminó siendo usado para otro diametralmente opuesto. En este contexto, las obras de Bonadies y Olavarría, al igual que la torre en sí, se plantean conscientemente procesuales. Se trata de negociaciones en un territorio contestado que inician un juego doble: por un lado, los artistas abordan la iconografía de la torre por fuera, reproduciendo la arquitectura aspiracional que encarna el sueño moderno del progreso, y por otro, exploran los recorridos provisionales y las cartografías domésticas de los hogares que se han moldeado al diseño por dentro. De ahí que la torre es un injerto: un símbolo de la lógica bursátil que se vio mezclado con la precariedad vivencial.
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Bonadies & Olavarría
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| Bonadies & Olavarría |
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Por dentro y por fuera, la torre envuelve contradicciones y fracasos. El logro de este proyecto en proceso es de extrapolar esta precaria situación para plantear inquietudes más amplias. En este sentido, las obras de Bonadies y Olavarría no solamente cuestionan lo que conllevó a la ruptura del proyecto modernizador y el sueño desarrollista connotados por la Torre de David, sino que a partir de su práctica artística plantean dudas sobre la vigencia de esos discursos y las medidas se están tomando hoy en día para ofrecer alternativas para el futuro del país.
Lisa Blackmore
Caracas, febrero 2011
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