Letters to the Mayor

 

Letters to the Mayor: Buenos Aires, Galería Monoambiente, March 2016.

In 2014, Storefront for Art and Architecture initiated Letters to the Mayor, an ongoing program designed to highlight the sometimes overlooked relationship between architects and local political authorities, and to facilitate new conversations between them.

In Buenos Aires, Grupo Bondi (Eugenio Gómez Llambi, Iván López Prystajko) combined the architect’s and mayor’s workspace though a kind of overlay: a massive bureaucratic desk is covered with colorful pools of waxy pigment (à la Lydia Benglis’s poured latex rubber works of the 1960s), which drips down its sides and spatters onto the floor. It could be read as the residue of architects’ passionate strivings on behalf of the cities they love, sometimes resulting in nothing more than a lot of spilled ink, effort, and lifeblood. Alternately, it represents the architect’s revenge upon the bureaucrats who have blocked their best ideas from being realized: an orgy of violent color bleeds all over the desk, rendering it useless but finally beautiful, a monument to the frustrated creative process. A third element built into each iteration of Letters to the Mayor, in addition to the letters and desks, is an artistic wallpaper that reflects ideas and issues unique to each city.

Source : domus, avril 2016, http://www.domusweb.it