TRANS-APPEARANCES
By Aixa Portero
By Aixa Portero
Many cultures understand the garden as a place where the creative essence is present, inviting you to meditate about life. Granada is an example of garden culture. When I started working in this city, I chose the fountain and the pond as its most representative elements (Alhambra, Generalife, Andalusian patios …).
The project is intended to reflect the empty spaces of our culture. It is in this kind of space, eminently dynamic and active, where we reach fulfilment. A stillness where the visible and invisible worlds come together, opening a door to understanding everything around us. There is hardly any empty spaces that allow us to find ourselves to think.
The harmony is replaced by instability. Anxiety is evil in the world. This book is an allegory of the garden, an attempt to recreate an open space within one closed, to bring out in the viewer’s mind a contradiction between the tangible lack of open space and the presence of a building, container of shadows from the city.
The Inside of the courtyard of the Counts’ Palace of Gabia, must-circulation path, was covered for all who visit it, with an element that would allow light through in and, at the same time, moving shadows were projected on the floor (due to reflection forms over water).
For this purpose, I chose grey fabric scaffold, similar found in the city scaffolding surrounding the buildings under restoration or construction.
This grey fabric works as sky simultaneously holding other parts made of the same material which overlap each other, achieving different degrees of opacity so that on the one hand set the silhouette of a supposed city to the base fabric and, on the other hand, undefined cast shadows on the ground of the courtyard. This fabric scaffold is subject to the first floor by a wooden frame to which said fabric is fixed.
The balcony is configured as an element that allows the viewer to approach the work from another perspective. It is a transit offering to remember the feeling of a living presence of the landscape and the Spanish culture. He is the passage from inside to outside, from private to public, hence it is chosen as base of the work. The architectural model plays an important role, because as constructive and functional system is an indispensable part of the work created.
Moreover, and in order to provide the installation of further integration with the surrounding architecture and recreate closely linked to the city of Granada outdoor spaces, part of the floor surrounding the courtyard was covered by a colour perceptually associated with standing water garden and same chromatic branch colours.
Water, as the first element where the reflection is discover, where an illusionism that debates realism occurs, reversing reality and multiplying. Murky waters of the transparent, those in the know of causing the death of Narcissus. The mirror as regroup of all distances, all absences.
The time dimension is concentrated in this space: time overlap. I’m interested in breaking the normal angle of observation of the work, which brings forth a feeling of estrangement from them.
I attempt to challenge the aforementioned point of view of the work propose different angles, different observations, introduce the viewer to question the established order of reference to the artistic disciplines. The reflection insists in the ephemeral, reinforcing the fleeting of presence.