ROAD TO NOWHERE
Carlos
Brillembourg on El Helicoide
Downward Spiral: El Helicoide’s Descent from
Mall to Prison, edited by Celeste Olalquiaga and Lisa Blackmore. New York: Terreform,
2018. 255 pages.
By 1957, Caracas was among the most cosmopolitan
urban centers in all of the Americas. The discovery of massive oil wealth in
1922 had jump-started Venezuela’s modernization, and, by the 1950s, the economy
was booming. Large infrastructure projects went to famous European engineers
such as Riccardo Morandi and Eugène Freyssinet. An emerging middle class
decorated their homes with modern furniture from Italy and Scandinavia, and
automobiles from the United States crowded the new highways. The city’s triumph
also manifested in extraordinary architecture: Commissions by international
luminaries such as Gio Ponti, Richard Neutra, Roberto Burle Marx, and Oscar
Niemeyer dotted the country, while Venezuelan architects erected touchstones of
the country’s modernism, including the seminal Ciudad Universitaria by Carlos
Raúl Villanueva, Cipriano Domínguez’s multiuse Centro Simón Bolívar, and the
exceptional Hotel Humboldt by Tomás José Sanabria. In 1955, the young, talented
Venezuelan architect Jorge Romero Gutiérrez was asked to design a residential
complex on a very difficult hilly site known as Roca Tarpeya. Rather than
submit plans for a conventional apartment building, however, he proposed an
audacious alternative: an elliptical drive-though shopping center with stores,
restaurants, gymnasiums, and several large event spaces, to be accessed by a
continuous vehicular ramp wrapping around the ziggurat-like structure—a rounded
pyramid visible to the city.
For Downward Spiral: El Helicoide’s
Descent from Mall to Prison, editors Celeste Olalquiaga and Lisa Blackmore
have gathered twenty-eight essays on the history of this iconic structure. The
contributors include architects, historians, artists, writers, critics, and
curators—most of them Venezuelan—and together provide a welcome range of
perspectives on Gutiérrez’s darkly fascinating building. Many writers delve
into the structure’s unique history. El Helicoide de la Roca Tarpeya began as
an embodiment of an optimistic vision of Venezuela’s future—one shaped by a
buoyant, debt-fueled economy—but it met its demise as a site of incarceration
and the torture of prisoners of the state: After lying derelict for several
years, and briefly housing the displaced, El Helicoide reincarnated as a
notorious prison helmed by the Venezuelan intelligence service. As writer and
architect Federico Vegas writes in “El Helicoide of Babel,” the structure “has
become an enigma of uniqueness and omnipotence, and, at least on the grounds of
functionality, it continues to stand as proof of gigantic and enduring errors.”
At the time of its conception, El Helicoide embodied the exuberant, streamlined values of the automobile age. In “The Automobile as Generator of Architectural Form,” René Davids situates El Helicoide within the visionary car-centric architecture of the era, noting that contemporary architects also drew up proposals for “superhighways flying over main arteries, parking lots suspended over rivers, and monumental buildings that placed cars at the front and center of their designs.” In fact, plans for El Helicoide were included in “Roads,” the “first exhibition of the art of roadbuilding,” which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961. Yet the construction of El Helicoide was never completed: Soon after workers broke ground, the Venezuelan economy began to contract, and the company funding the building went bankrupt in 1961, leaving the structure empty and unfinished. (Perhaps the project would have failed regardless of the economy, and the car-centric design of the spiraling strip mall-parking lot hybrid may have been its undoing: The unwieldy circulation scheme would likely have left the structure clogged with traffic.)
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| Page from Bonadies & Olavarría’s Kid Heli: In the Belly of the Beast, work in progress. |
In 1975, the state took control of the enormous, empty, and still-unfinished building without a very clear idea of what to do with it. From 1979 to 1982, the government used El Helicoide as temporary housing for ten thousand displaced people, but the structure’s continuous ramps were not well suited to this use. In “An Uneasy Cohabitation: San Agustín del Sur and El Helicoide,” Diego Larrique describes El Helicoide’s deleterious effect on its neighbors during this period. Residents in the surrounding environs of San Agustín complained of foul smells and sewage flowing into the streets, and reported hearing frequent gunfire. In 1973, a state-run organization proposed converting the site into a cultural center and home for the national library. But the limits imposed by the gigantic ramp, and the interior spaces carved out of the hill, would prove too difficult and expensive to deal with for the structure to be viable for civic-institutional use. Finally, in 1985, the building was given to DISIP, the Venezuelan intelligence and counterintelligence agency; a decade later, DISIP began using the structure as a jail, mostly for political prisoners. Perversely, the building’s design—which remained resistant to so much—functioned well as a prison; its interior labyrinth of small spaces without natural light made effective jail cells.
THE MASSIVE CONCRETE BUILDING now looms over the city as a symbol of a failed state. In Downward Spiral, artists Ángela Bonadies and Juan José Olavarría illustrate the contrast between the idealism of the architect’s vision and the reality of a government-sanctioned palace of torture and incarceration. In a chapter from their 2017 graphic novel, Kid Heli, a flying saucer (El Helicoide turned upside down) hovers above the skyline sending a beam of light to the ground. “That belongs to the manager of the ruin, the language Bureaucrat, the father of nothingness,” observes one character, looking up at the building-cum-alien invader. Another answers, “The helicoidal heart is a cemetery.”
One of the book’s most powerful testimonies
appears in Albinson Linares’s interview with the political activist Rosmit
Mantilla, who was imprisoned in El Helicoide from 2014 to 2016 for allegedly
financing opposition protests. (In December 2015, while incarcerated, he was
elected to the National Assembly.) He describes his arrest: “Right under my
eyes, one of these police officers pulled out a wad of cash from his bullet
proof vest, and some leaflets about a protest march, and planted them inside my
backpack.” Then, once he reached El Helicoide, he recalls, “they took me down
to a cell they call El Infiernito (Little Hell) which measures
five by three meters. There were 22 people in there, a mix of common criminals
and political prisoners, all crouching on the ground. I spent eight days in
that disgusting windowless cell. We had to urinate and defecate into buckets
and bags, there was no ventilation, and the cell was permanently lit with
bright lights.” During his time at El Helicoide, Mantilla gathered testimonies
from his fellow captives, documenting a litany of tortures and abuses. Today,
the political prisoners who remain continue to stage violent protests and
hunger strikes (including as recently as this past July).
As accounts like Mantilla’s emphasize, the monumental pyramid is not simply a ruin but an active participant in the state’s repressive mission, and any assessment of El Helicoide as a poetic allegory for the failure of modernism, or as a work of art, must reckon with that important fact. Indeed, the state has instrumentalized the building’s very deterioration: The structure’s dysfunction aids the mission of torture and abuse, contributing to the suffering of prisoners and threatening the population at large. El Helicoide’s prominence in the urban landscape—a fact that sets it apart from most prisons—is also notable. Looming over Caracas, it transforms the city itself into a vast panopticon.
In “Out of the Ashes: Building and Rebuilding
the Nation,” Blackmore argues that Venezuela’s past can be understood as a
recurring cycle of destruction and reconstruction, beginning with the
devastating Caracas earthquake of 1812, as Simón Bolívar led Venezuelans in a
war of independence against Spain. Again and again, she demonstrates, one can
find the “impulse to conduct nation building through the construction of
dazzling architecture.” Without deeper, more structural changes to the economy
and civil society, visionary buildings simply provide a momentary, mirage-like
distraction—an illusion of civic wholeness. This cycle was profoundly
interrupted with the election of Hugo Chavez. The impetus for Chavez’s
“revolution” was destructive and not constructive. Its most urgent task was the
destruction of the institutions of the democratic state and the expropriation
of the free-enterprise economy.
Standing in contrast with the perverse
mutation of El Helicoide into a prison is Caracas’s aforementioned Ciudad
Universitaria. Villanueva’s building complex, built in the 1940s and ’50s,
serves as a testament to the resilience and longevity of the architect’s
original vision. Architecture, at its best, materializes a more just future,
but as Downward Spiral reminds us, it can also do the
opposite. El Helicoide both symbolizes the loss of Venezuela’s progressive and
civic optimism and makes concrete the fear and repression propagated by a
criminal state. This anthology presents the unique case of El Helicoide as a
cautionary tale of the complex relationship between architecture and the
society it serves.
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| © Peter Weibel |
Peter Weibel - global aCtIVISm
Globalization
and technological development have given rise to civil activism world-wide. We
can identify two phases of globalization: the first was the industrial
revolution driven by machinery from 1800 onwards, and the second the data-based
information revolution that started in 1900. With digitization, the transition
from an alphabetic to a numeric code, the technical basis was laid upon which
the media became personalized and people networked to a far greater degree than
ever before. Every person became a transmitter. Social media created new
horizontal and transversal social structures.
People no
longer live in a “small-data” environment, in which interaction between them
and their environment is limited to a small amount of data, but in a “big-data”
environment in which this interaction takes place more or less by the second.
In the stimulus-reaction model between man and the environment both the amount
of data has increased and data frequency has risen immensely.
In blatant
contrast to this daily experience of the reciprocal influence of man and the
environment through the new technologies, in a representative democracy citizens
are only entitled to exert an influence on the big issues of politics by voting
– every four years. In the highly technological lifeworld of the twenty-first
century fundamental changes take place not only at an interpersonal level, but
also in the relationships between man and the environment, which occasionally
seem too much for society to handle. The term used to describe such changes is
crisis, from the climate crisis via the finance crisis through to the crisis in
democracy (Peter Sloterdijk argues that the state pursues “civic exclusion”).
The current protest groups, such as the Indignados, the Occupy movement, and so
on, could be said to represent new corrective cultures, which search for
solutions to these seemingly intractable crises and the partial inability of
politics (the booty of banks) to act.
The new forms
of spontaneous mass protests by individuals have shown, especially in the case
of the Arab Spring, how at least for brief moments in history, established
power systems can be annulled. Problems of democracy and the economy, above all
corruption, are also foci of global activist protests just as are a call for
adherence to human rights, peaceful solutions for global conflicts, a sound
immigration policy, health care, protection of animals and the environment.
In the
Anthropocene epoch there are conflicts between the Earth’s friends and foes. As
a result, we are seeing efforts to create new tribunals and new contracts
between man and nature (for example, under the aspect of sustainability),
between generations and nation, citizens and the state, which seem particularly
feasible in the digital society. This expansion of the legal sphere has
resulted in the creation, amongst other things, of NGOs (non-governmental
organizations), which in recent decades have played an important, pioneering
and preparatory role for global activism; one need only think of the
sensational actions of Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Transparency
International, etc., as captured by a global media. Evidently, large portions
of society feel the state does not adequately protect citizens’ rights, but on
the contrary de facto violates them in some instances. This has prompted
citizens to create new organizational forms to tackle this task themselves.
Following the “global city” (Saskia Sassen, The Global City, 1991) and “global
governance” (Brundtland Report, 1987) a new form of social action is emerging;
namely, “performative democracy”, which centers on the “global citizen.” The
latter represents vital interests of humanity as a whole, issues that cut
across the individual nation states. In other words, global activism is based
on “global citizenship.”
Performative
interventions by artist groups such as Pussy Riot, in conjunction with the mass
media’s dissemination of these events, have revealed how activists can make a
genuine contribution to overcoming a crisis situation by bluntly drawing
attention to grievances. To some extent the practices of artistic performance
and audience participation that have characterized art for sixty years are now
invading the sphere of politics. Audience participation in art as a consequence
of the performative turn has probably created the historical prerequisites for
the new civic participation in democracy. The art of the interactive media has
anticipated social models.
With the
exhibitions Net_Condition (1999/2000), CRTL [Space]. Rhetorics of Surveillance
from Bentham to Big Brother (2001/2002), and Making Things Public. Atmospheres
of Democracy (2005) at an early date ZKM pointed to the opportunities and risks
that the digital society offers. Moreover, for years ZKM has presented
practices of artistic performance and the participation of the public. These
practices have now evidently spilled over into the sphere of politics. After
all, on the one hand people talk about the crisis in democracy, indeed even of
“post-democracy.” And yet, on the other, a whole host of civic activist
movements are on the rise all over the world. The slogan of the Boston Tea
Party (1773), which ultimately led to the outbreak of the War of Independence
in America in 1775 was: “No taxation without representation.” Today’s citizens
seem to be demanding “no taxation without participation.” The exhibition global
aCtIVISm focuses firmly on this new civic involvement. As the emphasis of the
word CIVIS in “aCtIVISm” shows, the thrust is the practical and performative
development of the difference between citoyen and bourgeois. The politicians of
modern democracy are mistaken in thinking that people are bourgeois. In
reality, in order for democracy to remain viable it needs the active citoyen.
This is why the American founders of the democracy theory, from Walter Lippmann
to John Dewey, repeatedly invoke the vital function of the citizen.
The word
citoyen (derived from cité “town,” Latin civitas “citizenship,” “state”) refers
to the citizen, who in the tradition and spirit of the Enlightenment takes an
active and responsible part in the community and shapes it, based on the values
of the French Revolution: liberté, egalité, fraternité. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
wrote: “The citoyen is a highly political being, who does not express his
political interest but that of the common good. However, this is not restricted
to the sum of individual expressions of will, but extends beyond it.” (The
Social Contract or Principles of Political Right; French original: Du Contrat
Social ou Principes du Droit Politique, 1762). He continues: “The true meaning
of this word has almost completely disappeared of late; most people confuse
town (ville) and polis (cité), city dwellers (bourgeois) and citizens
(citoyen).” Immanuel Kant also refers to this important distinction in his writings.
The free will of the citizen in the sense of Hegel’s philosophy of law must not
be reduced to the free choice between several options determined by politics,
but rather consists of the citizen making proposals to politics. A new language
and rhetoric of politics is developed, which is composed of elements that have
both a historical foundation and are also based on new technologies. Defining
this new language simply as a protest fails to recognize the innovation
involved, for what we are experiencing in reality is the invention of the
citizen. In the same way that “inventing the people” (Edmund S. Morgan,
Inventing the People, 1989) was necessary in order to form a representative
democracy in the first place, today it requires the invention of the citizen by
the citizen in order to advance a jeopardized democracy. So it would be wrong
to talk about pure protest movements; what we have are anticipatory democracy
movements.
The exhibition
global aCtIVISm attempts to identify the approaches, tactics, strategies, and
methods of what I call “performative democracy,” and with the help of photos,
films, videos and blogs, social media and other mass media documents seeks to
chart the course of global activism. The latter is expressed in demonstrations
in public places, occupation of public institutions, barricades, strikes,
leaking, clowning, mourning, pray-ins, teach-ins, documentation in social
media, the placing of posters and banners, graffiti and street art, the
distribution of flyers, theater actions, flash mobs, media jacking, petitions
and public letters, art works, reenactments, toolkits, Internet activism. This
fusion of activism and art, or “Artivism” is arguably the first new art form of
the twenty-first century.
During the
exhibition the blog is intended to foster a discussion on the key topics of
global activism, interaction on spaces and the public realm as places of
protest, institutions and networks of activism, the tactical media and protest
tools for organizing and designing actions, Occupy as a reaction to the global
economic crisis, and state surveillance. Dietrich
Heißenbüttel, who has long occupied himself with global, artistic forms of activism
will moderate and edit the blog.
Further information on: www.global-activism.de
Iván de la Nuez
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| Bonadies & Olavarría |
De cara al mundo, jamás necesitó un departamento de propaganda. Ese frente estuvo siempre bien cubierto: lo mismo por Cartier-Bresson (“el ojo del siglo”) que por Barbara Walters; por Time o por la CNN, por Oliver Stone o por una nutrida tropa de fotorreporteros cubanos (Korda, Salas, Noval). Desde el primer día, él sería la noticia y el filtro; el actor, guionista y crítico de esa larga película de sí mismo que colonizó el relato de todo un país. No hay que olvidar que la cubana fue la primera revolución de su tipo en el uso extendido de la televisión y, que, a diferencia de otros países comunistas, no precisó de estatuas gigantescas para expandir la iconografía oficial. Para eso sirvió la fotografía, mucho más moderna, portátil… e imposible de derribar, llegado el caso.
Por si fuera poco, esa revolución coincidió con la eclosión del pop, cuya estética resultó idónea para canalizar su simbología y, de paso, consumar el tránsito “del Yo al Nosotros”, según la percepción humanista del pintor Raúl Martínez, máximo exponente cubano de esa tendencia. Todavía hoy, después de haberse transformado en un Estado comunista y cuando los guerrilleros supervivientes son ancianos, la impronta formal del pop persiste como el sello estético de una revolución que ha pasado a cifrarse en el reformismo.
2. Aunque haya desatado una de sus estéticas más efectivas, la expansión simbólica de la izquierda latinoamericana no empieza ni acaba en Cuba. De hecho, en sus inicios ni siquiera vino de la mano de la fotografía o el pop-art sino del muralismo surgido de la Revolución Mexicana, que además generó una novelística, trastocó los corridos y alcanzó una nada desdeñable presencia en Hollywood: ¡cómo olvidar a Marlon Brando interpretando a Emiliano Zapata!
Eso sí, el muralismo -como ocurriría más tarde con la Revolución Cubana- cumplió un requisito fundamental para sostener su presencia dentro de las estéticas de izquierda: expandirse en el tiempo y el espacio. Más allá de México y más allá de la propia revolución. Y esto no sólo porque Diego Rivera intentara un mural gigantesco en Nueva York, invitado por un Rockefeller que al final lo desestimó, debido al mensaje subversivo de la obra. También, quizá sobre todo, porque sin el muralismo hubiera sido imposible el arte chicano que tiene lugar en Estados Unidos a partir de los años sesentas del siglo pasado. Con su invasión latina a la ciudad anglosajona, y con esa facilidad para mezclar a Anthony Quinn con el American Home; Pancho Villa con el mundo postindustrial; Frida Kahlo con los carteles bolcheviques, el Sur con el Norte...
El modus operandi del muralismo, su insistencia en “sacar el arte de sus templos”, perdura incluso en el arte urbano posterior (sobre todo en el graffiti), de modo que su legado atraviesa el Nueva York de Basquiat y el Londres de Banksy, se hace presente en las paredes de Irlanda del Norte durante el conflicto armado y en el Muro de Berlín, frente al cementerio de La Habana -de la mano de Arte Calle en los años ochentas del siglo XX- y en las instalaciones virtuales de BLU ya cumplida la primera década del XXI.
3. Muralismo y pop, fotografía y graffiti, Hollywood y merchandising, pintadas anónimas y obras hechas por artistas de renombre, camisetas y gadgets, subastas en e-bay y desfiles de moda, radicalismos ideológicos y supersticiones… Todo esto, y más, ha servido para reciclar hasta el infinito al Che Guevara, sin duda el símbolo visual más reconocible de la izquierda latinoamericana. Gracias a su ubicuidad –vayamos donde vayamos nos lo tropezamos en alguna esquina-, resulta que el hombre cuyo modelo era Garibaldi y descreía del típico héroe americano ha acabado en Hollywood, representado por Omar Shariff, Antonio Banderas, Gael García o Benicio del Toro. El mismo que apostó, en El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba, por un arte al servicio del pueblo, fue rápidamente fagocitado por artistas del mainstream: Annie Leibovitz, Vik Muniz, Pedro Meyer... El Ministro que firmó los billetes con desprecio y llegó a predecir el fin del dinero hoy aparece estampado en moneda corriente que manosea cualquiera. Y el ateo que llegó a autoproclamarse como el Anticristo ha sido renombrado por David Kunzle como “Chesucristo” en un estudio sobre las representaciones místicas de su figura. En el trabajo más abarcador sobre este asunto, la crítica inglesa Trisha Ziff ha concebido el proyecto itinerante Che: Market and Revolution, en el que se recogen unas trescientas piezas, reconocidas o anónimas, que reafirman o pervierten la foto original tomada por Alberto Korda el 5 de marzo de 1960 en La Habana, a escasos metros de Jean Paul Sartre y Simone de Beauvior.
4. Consideremos esta aparente coincidencia. Cuando el editor Giangiacomo Feltrinelli difunde la imagen del Che, se están gestando los estallidos del 68. Desde esa conexión, lo que había funcionado como una iconografía local pasó a convertirse en símbolo del mundo (y en símbolo de lo que ese mundo debía entender como “latinoamericano”). Siempre magnificando una lectura radical del Continente y centrifugando, desde ella, lo mismo a derivas peronistas –que ha conocido tanto la pictografía del “periodo clásico” del General como las variaciones posteriores de Evita en Hollywood y Broadway, nada menos- que a la larga marcha que se estira desde Sandino hasta los comandantes que lideraron la revolución nicaragüense en su nombre.
Esta estética no hubiera sido perdurable sin su poder de síntesis. Por el lado político, condensa las gestas bolivarianas y las reformas liberales de Benito Juárez; el proyecto continental de José Martí y el marxismo indigenista de Mariátegui; el castrismo y el zapatismo, la independencia del siglo XIX y el socialismo del siglo XXI. Por el lado cultural, compacta el muralismo mexicano y el surrealismo de Frida Kahlo o Wifredo Lam, el boom de la novela y la teoría de la dependencia, el Nuevo Cine y la Nueva Trova.
No se trató, en cualquier caso, de una simbología conciliadora. Más bien, puede considerarse un capítulo de la cultura de la violencia que ha llegado a dominar las interpretaciones sobre y desde América Latina que aún perduran.
5. Como el Calibán de Shakespeare, recreado por los escritores caribeños (Roberto Fernández Retamar, Aimé Cesaire, Kamau Brathwhaite), esta iconografía intenta desplazar a América Latina de su tradicional y agónica elección: entre Próspero (el pragmático y agresivo Estados Unidos) y Ariel (la espiritual y colonialista Europa). De ahí su apuesta por una alternativa –ese calibanesco “mascullar en lengua extraña”- y por el desmantelamiento del clasicismo visual de los regímenes oligárquicos. Si éstos se caracterizaron por la “reproducción” de la alta cultura occidental, los iconos surgidos de la izquierda se valieron de la “apropiación” y, aún más, de la “confrontación” para validarse. Por eso el protagonismo de las clases pobres, la reivindicación étnica y una constante perversión de los estilos del arte occidental, como el surrealismo, el minimalismo, el pop o el expresionismo.
Tales operaciones adquieren distintos matices en el Subcomandante Marcos y en Hugo Chávez. Y si el primero fue definido como un guerrillero posmoderno que “renovaba” al Che Guevara, el segundo fue catalogado como un caudillo posmoderno que “actualizaba” a Fidel Castro. El mexicano sentó las bases de una guerrilla incruenta y echó mano de elementos de la cultura de masas (desde un personaje del siglo XIX como el Zorro hasta Superbarrio o los luchadores enmascarados).
Chávez, simbólicamente, se presentó como un mosaico humano capaz de encarnar al Perón que marcó la política argentina incluso después de su muerte y al Velasco Alvarado que se desplazó hacia la izquierda a fuerza de perseguir guerrilleros en el Perú de los sesentas. Fue el Omar Torrijos que en plena Plaza de la Revolución se sacaba tranquilamente una petaca de whisky en medio de un discurso de Fidel Castro y el Getulio Vargas que provocaba la subida de los precios del café en el mundo. Junto a todos ellos, una constante le ofreció su mayor anclaje simbólico: Simón Bolívar. Pero si la iconografía del Che Guevara se había expandido desde la fotografía y el pop, la de Hugo Chávez tiene vinculación directa con la telenovela, que se caracteriza por su escaso comedimiento.
6. No todo ha sido poder o estética “positiva” en la izquierda latinoamericana. Ni todos los dardos han sido lanzados al imperialismo o el enemigo externo. Durante los años 70-80 del siglo pasado, proliferaron poéticas contraculturales opuestas a los autoritarismos de derecha y, asimismo, incómodas con la izquierda oficial, también autoritaria, de esos tiempos. Se trata de una época turbulenta marcada por el ascenso y caída del sandinismo en Nicaragua y la represión militar en el Cono Sur, Operación Cóndor incluida. Es el tiempo del llamado conflicto de baja intensidad en Centroamérica, ese espacio tórrido de la Guerra Fría y, asimismo, de las Malvinas. Años en los que neoliberalismo y dictadura llegan de la mano, con la anuencia del reaganismo, y también en los que se perfila el Guantánamo posterior de la globalización.
Esta estética es menos representativa que “somática”, por decirlo de algún modo. Ahora es el cuerpo –y no la imagen del cuerpo- lo que adquiere importancia. Y la inhumanidad –no el humanismo- lo que emerge de unas representaciones simbólicas obligadas a lidiar con la tortura, el exilio y la desaparición.
Desde las performances transgresoras de Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis hasta la literatura underground de Néstor Perlongher, desde el rock alternativo hasta los grafitis de OV3RGOZE, desde la teatralidad del grupo argentino El Periférico de objetos hasta agrupaciones de resistencia ciudadana como Mujeres por la vida, es perceptible una constelación de proyectos colectivos, poblados de antihéroes guiados por la resistencia antes que por la revolución. En ocasiones, incorporan el carnaval y la promiscuidad sexual. Y no es casual, en esta cuerda, la importancia del chileno Pedro Lemebel, pionero en el emplazamiento al casi siempre mal resuelto dilema entre izquierda y homosexualidad. (Del muralismo a la estética del chavismo es demostrable una impertérrita continuidad machista).
Al mismo tiempo, el lugar del individuo o la puesta en solfa de los eufemismos de una Latinoamérica “esencial”, tanto como la negativa a convertir la pobreza en folclor, caracterizan este desmarque de la iconografía dominante de la izquierda anterior y reflejan una zona crítica que ha ejercido una fuerte influencia en las poéticas más recientes del arte latinoamericano.
Si durante un tiempo, algunos creadores optaron por esquivarla –línea que tal vez inaugura José Luis Cuevas en México frente al muralismo-, no son pocos los artistas actuales que han decidido volver sobre ella y someter esa estética a un cuestionamiento profundo. Es el caso del chicano Daniel J. Martínez (Estados Unidos), Nicola Costantino (Argentina), José Angel Toirac (Cuba), Vik Muniz (Brasil), Marcelo Brodsky (Argentina) o el dúo de Ángela Bonadies-Juan José Olavarría (Venezuela), con obras que asumen, diseccionan y se cuestionan en profundidad una tradición ya centenaria que ha marcado la imagen latinoamericana de manera rotunda.
En las décadas anteriores, los artistas acabaron jugando con las reglas del agitprop. Ahora, el agitprop ha sido pasado por la licuadora de las reglas del arte. Una venganza altamente creativa y, sobre todo, necesaria.
Este artículo salió en el segundo número de la revista "La Maleta de Portbou".
http://www.lamaletadeportbou.com/
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Papel LITERARIO PAG.2 EL NACIONAL Sábado, 14 de abril de 2012
Papel LITERARIO PAG.2 EL NACIONAL Sábado, 14 de abril de 2012
Hablan Ángela Bonadies y Juan José Olavarría
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The Tower of David
In the early '90s Caracas dreamed of a shimmering downtown financial
centre—now it's the tallest squat in the world.
Twenty years ago, Venezuelan financier David Brillembourg dreamed of a
shimmering, glass-clad financial centre in downtown Caracas to symbolise the
nation's economic prowess. The destiny of Torre Confinanzas was another—to
become home to an informal community of 2,500 homeless people who are gradually
colonising, and completing, the unfinished 45-storey building. Two Venezuelan
artists, Ángela Bonadies and Juan José Olavarría, document the story of a
contemporary heterotopia. Their research is outlined in this interview
conducted by Jesús Fuenmayor, director of the Caracas Periférico art centre,
who asks them about the resulting work, La Torre por dentro y por fuera
Jesús Fuenmayor: Did you approach this project as a way to criticise modernity via the language of art? How important was the crisis of modernity in determining your choice of subject and the project's development?
Ángela Bonadies/Juan José Olavarría: There's definitely an implicit critique of modernity at work in the project, as it's at the heart of a promise that wasn't kept, a truncated project. As such, the crisis of modernity is the basis of a new state of affairs. However, it is also important to point out that many artists and curators criticise the dominant and currently obsessive strain of thought regarding modernity itself. It's as if modernity were the place where "all was lost", where a continual focus is placed on art and architecture, which subsequently makes it an insular look at modernity that omits, in Venezuela's case, the surrounding historic and sociopolitical framework. In a sense, the modernity that is re-read and re-interpreted was not elaborated nor did it lay deep enough foundations to become a "culture" as such. Instead, it remained a set of isolated cases and exceptions.
Choosing the tower as our object of study led us towards different eras and other pre- and postmodern situations—and that's what interested us. The building is not considered heritage because it doesn't fit into the modern parameters of beauty. This modern building was the product of a banking boom that occurred in the late 1980s, as part of a project to transform this area of Caracas into a financial district. The tower was going to be one of the buildings lining a boulevard of banks. In a sense, it is the result of a philosophy of modernity based on the stock exchange, closer to the ideology of Wall Street's towering silhouette than perfect humanist Corbusian forms.
The tower is filled with economic and political history that predates its appropriation by squatters: the image of the emergence of powerful groups who were not part of the amos del valle (or rather "lords of the valley" with old money). It reflects new fortunes, a bonanza that was vulnerable to risks, surplus value, speculation, the lack of controls, and a rupture of the hegemony wielded by the few local families who had dwelled in an archipelago of modernity. The crisis of modernity is the crisis of utopia. The tower is a heterotopia, which makes it an "ambiguous space".
When you choose a topic to research from a certain type of artistic practice such as yours, which is constantly calling its own point of view into question, and when you choose a topic as unique as David's Tower, is there not a risk that you lose some critical edge? What I mean is, the topic is so "spectacular", so unique, that it could go beyond any personal vision and thus annul the idea that we are first and foremost dealing an artwork, an artistic investigation. Does it not instead suggest that we are in the presence of a freak phenomenon rather than an artwork?
On the contrary. Firstly, we approached the object from an ethical distance and we didn't regard it as a "freak" phenomenon to be exploited. If we didn't achieve that, then the work is at a loss from the very outset. The tower is not "a topic", nor a theme park, but a space-object where situations converge that enable us to observe, research and develop a project from different disciplines we are interested in. We want to deal with a general problem that has specific historical, economic, political, and demographic implications. The tower is an object, among many others, that represents the lack of synchrony between deeds and words; it is a symptomatic space, not a spectacle. The people who live there are not acting out a play or performing, they are finding a solution to an issue affecting their lives.
What's more, the tower is not unique or isolated, but is part of a permanent absence and presence: the absence of decisions to confront a problem and the presence of a group of people trying to survive. In this case, there's a contrast because instead of being on a piece of wasteland, on the peripheries, or up on a hill, this situation is occurring in an abandoned building, an aspirational skyscraper, that is really a container that molds itself and assimilates what's outside it for a common cause: survival. And this in turn represents another void: that of financial controls and another struggle between political and economic power. Ultimately, all we are doing is focusing on the imprint that power leaves in its wake: a void in solving problems and the massive amount of bureaucracy concentrated in the offices where decisions are made. That is the real theme park. The tower is a reality that is as human as geometry.
There are other cities, like Johannesburg, that have similar cases.
There are two elements that play a very special role in the way the problem (the object of study) is dealt with: firstly, you decided to "attack it" together and, secondly, you have presented this work in parts. On what basis did you make these decisions? Were there any preliminary decisions preceding them? Is it part of a carefully calculated plan, or is it the tower itself that imposes this approach? Why?
The tower imposes its own rhythm. We can try to work out what route to take to approach it and try to "know everything" about it. But then, when you get closer, the decisions are not yours to make because you have to depend on the people who are not involved in production deadlines, so you have to be there, watch and wait. That's fine. You have to respect the way time works. Preconceived ideas adapt and change. The work is flexible and it consolidates as you do it. Sometimes it's good that there are two of us because whilst one of us works, the other rests, and when we are both there, one complements the other.
You must have a very ambiguous relationship with this "object of study". How many skyscrapers on the planet have been transformed into squats? Probably none, but this building is not at the centre of media attention either here or abroad (imagine for a minute that squatters took over the Statue of Liberty—it would probably make us forget all about the twin towers). In the face of the ambiguity surrounding how the public would assimilate an event of these dimensions, what do you think is happening: a) that this is the greatest example of the scam of modernist progress, b) that it leaves us so perplexed that we can't even react, or c) that this is the best way to shake off modernist complexes?
There are several cases like this in the world. Everywhere there are economic problems linked to housing crises, new ways of inhabiting buildings are created. As we mentioned before, there are similar cases in South Africa. There is also a lot of work regarding politics, housing and the economy carried out by socially committed artists such as Martha Rosler, in the United States.
But if we have to choose from your three options, we'd pick the last one: to shake off modernist complexes. The art of the present, as Serge Daney rightly points out, cannot be full of regrets. We need to look back and see what elements in the past mapped out our current situation, but not to take a blinkered look at a particular period, with tear-filled eyes, "in search of lost time".
In Israel, architects work according to military strategies to design whole housing estates. In Venezuela, architects have to cede their ideas to the most precarious needs. How can a profession be so successful in one place (determining even the height of windows on the basis of bombs) and be so unsuccessful in another (making a skyscraper that ends up as a place where bags of excrements are thrown from the fiftieth floor)? What determining cultural factors make contrasts like this possible? What is the point of continuing in a profession that is dedicated to such nonsense? What criticism of architecture as a design problem did you have to take on board in order to understand this phenomenon from a cultural viewpoint?
This is not an architectural or design-related problem. The architect of the tower planned to make a skyscraper to house a company, a hotel and a mall. Nobody planned for this building to be taken over by squatters. Basically, as the State did not respond to the housing deficit, people transform every space they find "idle" into a place to live. When people take over a building, they don't see a construction loaded with cultural or formal implications, but a piece of wasteland with a roof and stairs, and ample space to set up home in. The building was left half-built because of a political and economic problem. Architecture here is nothing more than a vehicle to talk about things. The content moves around this vehicle, which might just as well have been a bridge, a hill, a plot of land or a warehouse.
It's true that architecture and urban planning are matters for the State, in terms of what you mentioned about Israel. It's also true that totalitarian regimes benefit from a particular type of architecture, which ends up being part of its discourse of power, as in the emblematic case of Albert Speer or many monumental constructions in communist countries. Liberal governments are driven by something different; they work to maintain public works, to foster spaces of consumption and pleasure, and grant architects creative freedom. In a sense, every State "constructs" its image through different decisions: what it demolishes, what it builds, what it forgets, what it does and doesn't do. It would be interesting to do an analysis of our government in terms of its urban strategies, or lack of them.
Obviously the above comment is made by somebody who hasn't spent time, like you have, with the people who took over the skyscraper. So, how important are the experiences you have with these people? How has the research you're both doing determined what the squatters think of the building?
This project underwent a rupture. At the start we approached what for us was an idea of the tower, what it represented for the city, in Venezuelan art, as a form, grid, icon, metaphor. We made a series of works that reproduced what it looks like on the outside in terms of form and also in terms of its symbolism, the grid as a structure and history. It was important to adopt that distance from it. Then, when we entered the tower there was a shift. We might say that the language used on the inside is much more complex than we first thought and not because it is spectacular, but because it is organic. Everyone wants to live in the best possible conditions. When you are inside, you're not in the tower, you are in shared corridors, on the stairs or in a person or a family's home. The tower disappears when you are on the inside and it becomes a compendium of atomized languages that live together within the overall layout.
In earlier works, you have both addressed the problem of representation by adopting very different approaches. Ángela approaches the problem as somebody who criticizes it through the way it is classified. Juan José seeks to create an iconography of forgetfulness. What was it about David's Tower that led you to work together?
We started to work together in a different way, placing each of our works about the representation of memory and possible memories into dialogue. After this preliminary exercise, we decided to deal with making joint works and we focused on the tower, which allowed us to approach it from different places and disciplines. And it has worked. There is no overarching reason for this, except the possibility it offers us to bring together different references and trains of thought.
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La Torre de David
Un informe de arquitectura desde Caracas por Jesús Fuenmayor
En los años 90 Caracas soñó con un centro financiero resplandeciente , ahora es el edificio invadido más alto del mundo.
Hace veinte años, el empresario venezolano David Brillembourg soñó con un centro financiero brillante, de vidrio revestido en el centro de Caracas, como símbolo de valor económico de la nación. El destino de la Torre Confinanzas fue otro-para convertirse en el hogar de una comunidad informal de 2.500 personas sin hogar que están colonizando poco a poco, y completando, el edificio de 45 pisos sin terminar. Dos artistas venezolanos, Ángela Bonadies y Juan José Olavarría, documentan la historia de una heterotopía contemporánea. Su investigación se resume en esta entrevista realizada por Jesús Fuenmayor, director del Centro de Arte Periférico Caracas, que les pregunta sobre el trabajo resultante, La Torre Por Dentro y Por Fuera.
Jesús Fuenmayor: ¿Hay algún interés resaltante o enfático en aproximarse a este objeto de estudio como una forma de crítica a la modernidad desde el lenguaje del arte? ¿Qué tanta importancia tiene la crisis de la modernidad en la escogencia del objeto y el desarrollo del trabajo?
Ángela Bonadies/Juan José Olavarría: Una crítica a la modernidad está implícita en el trabajo, sin duda, pues es el centro de una promesa incumplida y un proyecto truncado; su crisis funda un nuevo estado de cosas. Pero también es importante resaltar que hay una crítica a un pensamiento dominante y casi obsesivo actual, de parte de buena cantidad de artistas y curadores, por la modernidad, como si fuera el lugar donde “todo se perdió”, enfocándose siempre en el arte y la arquitectura, por lo que se convierte en una mirada insular a la modernidad, descuidando, en el caso particular de Venezuela, el marco histórico y sociopolítico. De alguna manera esa modernidad que se relee y reinterpreta no se extendió ni sentó las bases profundas para convertirse en “cultura” y se quedó en casos aislados, en excepciones.
La elección de este objeto de trabajo, “la torre”, nos conduce a otras épocas y otras situaciones, pre y posmodernas, eso nos interesa. Este edificio no se considera patrimonio, pues no encaja en los parámetros modernos de belleza. Digamos que es un edificio modernizador, producto del boom bancario de finales de los años 80. Formaba parte de un proyecto de urbanización financiera para esa zona de Caracas. Iba a ser una de las torres de un boulevard bancario. Es, de alguna manera, producto del pensamiento de una modernidad bursátil, más cerca de la ideología de la empinada silueta de Wall Street que de las áureas unidades humanistas le corbusianas. Hay mucho encerrado en esa torre antes de ser invadida, una historia económica y política: la imagen de la “emergencia” de grupos de poder fuera de los “amos del valle”, las nuevas fortunas, la bonanza abierta al riesgo y al juego con el superávit, la especulación, la ausencia de controles y la ruptura formal con el culto archipiélago moderno local.La crisis de la modernidad es la crisis de la utopía. La torre es una heterotopía, lo que vendría a representar un “espacio ambiguo”.
Cuando se escoge un tema para ser investigado desde un cierto tipo de práctica artística como la de ustedes, que está constantemente poniendo en duda su propio punto de vista, y se escoge un tema tan único como el de la Torre David, ¿no se corre el riesgo de perder algo del filo crítico? Me refiero a que el tema es tan "espectacular", tan único, que podría rebasar cualquier visión personal y anular la idea de que uno se enfrenta ante todo a una obra, a una investigación artística, y que uno está más bien en presencia de un fenómeno más que de una obra.
Al contrario. Primero, nos acercamos al objeto con una distancia ética y no lo vemos como un fenómeno “freak” a ser explotado. Si eso no se logra, el trabajo está perdido desde el comienzo. La torre no es “un tema” ni un parque temático, sino un espacio-objeto que concentra situaciones que nos permiten observar, investigar y desarrollar un trabajo desde diferentes disciplinas en las cuales estamos interesados; queremos acercarnos a un problema general, que tiene implicaciones históricas, económicas, políticas, demográficas particulares. La torre es un objeto, entre muchos, que representa la falta de sincronía entre los discursos y los hechos, es un espacio sintomático, no es un espectáculo. Las personas que viven ahí no son actores de una obra o un performance, están resolviendo un tema vital.
Además, la torre no es un hecho único ni aislado, forma parte de una ausencia y una presencia permanentes. La ausencia de decisiones para enfrentar un problema, la presencia de un colectivo que busca sobrevivir. En este caso, crea un contraste porque en vez de situarse en un terreno baldío o periférico o en un cerro se sitúa en un edificio abandonado, en un rascacielos aspiracional, pero en realidad, es un contenedor que se amolda y asimila para una causa común, la supervivencia, y que representa a su vez otro vacío, el de la fiscalización financiera y otra pelea, entre el poder político y el económico. Al final, todo lo que hacemos es fijar la mira en la huella que deja el poder en su andanza: un vacío en la resolución de problemas y una concentración brutal en las oficinas donde se toman las decisiones. Eso sí es un parque temático. La torre es una realidad tan humana como la geometría.
Hay otras ciudades con casos similares, como Johannesburgo.
Hay dos elementos que participan de manera muy especial en el enfoque del problema (del objeto de estudio): primero, que decidieron "atacarlo" a cuatro manos y segundo que han estado presentando esta aproximación por partes. ¿En qué se basan estas decisiones? ¿Hay algunas decisiones preliminares que las anteceden? ¿Es parte de un plan cuidadosamente calculado o es el objeto de estudio el que impone esta aproximación? ¿Por qué?
El objeto de estudio es el que impone un ritmo. Podemos hacernos una idea de por dónde vamos a abordarlo y tratar de “saber todo” de ese objeto. Pero luego, cuando te aproximas, las decisiones no son sólo tuyas, tienes que contar con otras personas que no participan de tiempos de producción y hay que estar, ver y esperar. Eso está bien. Hay que respetar los tiempos. Las ideas preconcebidas se adaptan y cambian. El trabajo es flexible. Y se va construyendo. A veces es bueno que haya cuatro manos, mientras unas trabajan otras descansan y cuando todas están en el trabajo se complementan.
La relación con este "objeto de estudio" debe ser muy ambigua. ¿cuántos rascacielos en el planeta tierra han sido convertidos en un espacio de ocupación ilegal? Probablemente ninguno y sin embargo este edificio no está en el centro de la atención mediática ni acá ni en otras partes (imagino por un segundo que unos okupas invaden la estatua de La Libertad y seguramente nos harían olvidar la caída de las torres gemelas). Ante la ambigüedad de la recepción pública de un evento de estas dimensiones, ustedes qué se plantean: a) estamos ante al mayor ejemplo de la estafa del progreso modernista b) estamos ante un ejemplo que nos deja tan perplejos que no podemos reaccionar c) Esta es la mejor manera de dejar atrás los complejos modernistas.
Hay varios casos en el mundo. En todo lugar donde haya problemas económicos ligados a crisis de vivienda se crean nuevas formas de ocupación. Hay casos similares en Sudáfrica, como dijimos antes. También hay todo un trabajo desarrollado en torno a política, vivienda y economía por parte de artistas comprometidos como Martha Rosler, en Estados Unidos.Ahora, si hay que elegir entre tus tres opciones, nos quedamos con la última: dejar atrás los complejos modernistas. El arte del presente, como bien afirmó Serge Daney, no puede estar lleno de remordimientos. Es indispensable voltear y ver qué
del pasado proyectó nuestra actual perspectiva, pero no escrutar con gríngolas un determinado período, con los ojos llenos de lágrimas, “en busca del tiempo perdido”.
Aquí no hay problema arquitectónico ni de diseño. El arquitecto de la torre planeó hacer un rascacielos para que operara una empresa, un hotel, un centro comercial. Nadie planeó que se convirtiera en un edificio ocupado o invadido. Simplemente, al no haber respuesta del Estado para el vacío habitacional, la gente transforma todo lo que encuentra “ocioso”. Cuando la gente entra a invadir no ve un edificio con una carga cultural o formal, sino un espacio baldío con techo y escaleras, con espacios amplios para instalarse. El edificio fue dejado a medio construir por un problema político y económico. La arquitectura aquí es simplemente un vehículo para hablar de otras cosas. El contenido se mueve alrededor de ese vehículo, que bien podría ser un puente, un cerro, un terreno o un galpón.
Es cierto que la arquitectura y el urbanismo son temas de Estado, en relación a lo que mencionas de Israel. También es cierto que los regímenes totalitarios benefician un tipo de arquitectura, que termina siendo una parte de su discurso de poder, como el caso emblemático de Albert Speer o una gran cantidad de construcciones monumentales de los países comunistas. Los gobiernos liberales se mueven por un impulso distinto, dedicados al mantenimiento de las obras públicas, a propiciar espacios de consumo y placer, a la creatividad formal como una libertad otorgada. De alguna manera cada Estado “construye” su imagen a través de diferentes decisiones: lo que derriba, lo que levanta, lo que olvida, lo que hace y lo que no hace. Sería interesante hacer un análisis del discurso de nuestro gobierno a través de sus estrategias urbanas o la ausencia de ellas.
El comentario anterior, obviamente, es de alguien que no ha coexistido como ustedes con las personas que invadieron el rascacielos. Así que, ¿qué importancia tiene esa convivencia con los invasores para ustedes? ¿Cómo ha determinado la investigación que ambos están desarrollando la visión que tienen de este edificio sus invasores?
Este trabajo sufrió una importante ruptura. Al principio nos aproximamos a lo que era para nosotros la idea de la torre, lo que representaba: para la ciudad, dentro del arte venezolano, como forma, retícula, ícono, metáfora. Hicimos una serie de trabajos que reproducían su aspecto formal exterior y su carga simbólica, la retícula como estructura e historia. Fue importante tomar esa distancia. Luego, cuando entramos en la torre, hubo un giro. Podríamos decir que el lenguaje que se maneja dentro es mucho más complejo que nuestra preconcepción. Y no por espectacularidad, al contrario, sino por su organicidad. Todo el mundo quiere
vivir lo mejor posible. Cuando estás dentro no estás en la torre, estás en pasillos comunes, en escaleras o en la casa de una persona, de una familia. La torre desaparece cuando estás dentro y se transforma en un compendio de lenguajes atomizados que conviven bajo el trazado estructural.
Ambos han desarrollado un trabajo alrededor del problema de la representación con enfoques muy diferentes. Ángela se aproxima a ese problema como alguien que lo crítica por la vía de sus formas de clasificación. Juan José quiere hacer una iconografía de la desmemoria. ¿Qué es lo que la Torre de David hizo para hacerlos confluir en un trabajo en conjunto?
Comenzamos a trabajar juntos de otra manera, poniendo en diálogo trabajos de cada uno, sobre la representación de la memoria o las posibles memorias. Después de ese ejercicio preliminar decidimos abordar un trabajo en dupla y nos enfocamos en la torre, que nos daba la posibilidad de acercarnos desde diferentes lugares y disciplinas. Y ha funcionado. No hay una razón dominante más que la posibilidad de hacer converger distintas referencias y líneas de pensamiento.
arqa
Arquitectura e Arte Contemporâneas
# 94 - 95
Entrevista
por: Luís Santiago Baptista e Paula Melâneo
Arquitecta e fotógrafa (A. Bonadies), Artista Plástico (J. J. Olavarría), Autores "Torre de David"
Ángela Bonadies + Juan José Olavarría: Cada cidade e país têm a sua especificidade, cremos que não existe um contexto genérico latino-americano ou europeu ou asiático, mas que a paisagem urbana responde às alterações económicas, políticas e sociais específicas. O que acontece num país como a Venezuela? Onde as bases e estruturas são débeis, onde não se planeou nem o presente nem o futuro, de modo a que cidade seja estável e cresça de maneira orgânica mas, pelo contrário, a cidade se foi construindo aos pedaços, por partes, improvisada, o que dá destaque tanto à pobreza como à abundância, tanto às carências como às aspirações. Digamos que vivemos num país sem segredos, no sentido em que está tudo à vista, mas cheio de contradições, como a publicidade em que se fala dos grandes melhoramentos e da obra feita no país, assente sobre ruínas. Vivemos num país em que a retórica do discurso político desafia os argumentos pouco sedutores da realidade. No nosso contexto, em particular, a arquitectura tem-se comportado como um espectáculo de fogo-de-artifício. Houve intenções de urbanizar, particularmente em Caracas, mas não houve um plano sustentado. Têm-se feito construções ambiciosas, emblemáticas, modernas, marcos arquitectónicos a nível mundial, no entanto, a cidade como tal, não se desenvolve, porque nunca se resolveram problemas pré-modernos como a relação campo/cidade. As nossas cidades são agressivas para os peões e para os condutores, cheias de automóveis e com péssimas estradas. O sistema de autocarros não se tem actualizado, continua o mesmo que foi adquirido nos anos 70 e não tem horários, a sua frequência é arbitrária. Porque o combustível é tão barato, qualquer "carcaça" com rodas, pode abastecer e circular. Encher o tanque de um automóvel custa menos de um dólar. O metro de Caracas cobre grande parte da cidade, mas está em colapso: atrasa-se, em certas ocasiões não tem sistema de ventilação, nas horas de ponta é terrível. Todos os planos urbanísticos que foram feitos na Venezuela não foram acompanhados de uma política de planificação económica, de estradas, educacional. Permanecem teses esplêndidas do que se poderia fazer, teses atomizadas, isoladas, únicas, sobretudo aquelas que se fizeram sob a luz da modernidade e as suas promessas nos anos 50. Uma modernidade, ainda para mais, marcada pelo regime totalitário de Marcos Pérez Jiménez, para somar às contradições. Na actualidade, as obras, como a construção de habitações, saem da cartola de mágico dos políticos, traduzem-se em cifras gigantes, necessárias e impossíveis, mas lá estão, promessas urbanísticas, saídas, desta vez, da retórica revolucionária e igualitária. Mas, na realidade, mão se quer construir casas, querem-se votos. No caso da ocupação da conhecida como "Torre de David", as pessoas interessaram-se mais pelo fenómeno que representa um arranha-céus invadido que pelo problema subjacente. Esse arranha-céus representa para nós uma metáfora do país: sorte, deteriorização, abandono, ocupação, hierarquia, caudilhismo, disciplina militar, violência, caos, normas, segurança-insegurança, legalidade-ilegalidade.
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