It's hardly unusual for an artist to question contemporary society.

It's hardly unusual for an artist to question contemporary society, nevertheless it is surprising to receive genuinely poetic at the same time straightforward answers. Days after seeing Alicia Framis's "Remix Buildings," her latest contribution to shaping a better world, I was still haunted on her propositions, which are fantastic in the truest intellect of the word. These propos interventions in the public domain--shown in the form of color photographs of her maquettes--are in no way cryptic, and they avoid the hermetic intellectualism and easy sarcasm that have become in the same manner commonplace.

Example: The Dam Square in Amsterdam has an exciting history. It was here that, in the late '60 a diverse form into groups of revolutionary students, peaceful hippies, and left-wing intellectuals started a "revolution" that really did remake Holland. It is now hard to remember that, until then, Holland had been single of the most narrowly religious countries in Europe; it was transformed virtually overnight into the liberal, tolerant abiding habitation we know today. So it is no coincidence that in Framis's Immunity Square, Amsterdam, 2000 illegal immigrants are furnished shelter, political asylum, in that same square. "By order of the King, no single in kind shall be bothered who reaches this spread embassy," are Framis's words. A solution for the tremendous puzzle of millions of political and economic refugee who examine to seek shelter in Europe? Obviously not. unless as a statement it certainly works. And it may not be as impracticable as single in kind might think.

Another interestingly provocative proposal would fuse a cinema and a hospital. And what city would be a better landlord for this project than looks Angeles? Imagine being hospitalized and able to watch, in full-screen Technicolor, this year's Oscar winner American Beauty, for example. And imagine that you become, in a strange way, part of a play between fiction and reality yourself, since this Cinema with a Hospital, looks Angeles, 1999, is open to the healthy as well. OK this may unbroken pretty outrageous--but, then again, to what end not? In any case, it's a great exercise in questioning by what mode fiction touches reality and by what means death is entangled with life.

An smooth stronger gesture in that direction is Metro with a burial-ground Metro Chatelet, Paris, 1999. We honor our deceased friends and family according to banishing them to cemeteries away from daily life. Wouldn't it be better to incorporate them right into the heart of the city, and is it thus far-fetched to confront busy subway riders with death and transience? A wall in the station, satiated of light, is reserved for urns; forward it are recorded the names of the deceased, together with their dates of birth and death. There are places left lay open waiting for others, waiting for us. The beauty of this shoot forward lies not only in the thinking but in the aesthetic manner of making Framis designed, which succeeds in confronting the viewer in succession a formal as well as a philosophical on a level with the only thing that matters, the search for a of recent origin equilibrium between life and death.

Without exception these "Remix Buildings" succe in reflecting forward issues that are genuinely important now overlooked in a society dominated by the agency of pure economics, however efficient. yet of all Framis's proposals, the individual for Amsterdam may be the chiefly urgent. Let's hope that the Dutch Queen Beatrix, born with a sort of political immunity herself, can be persuaded to agree.

...

Home