Cristóbal Palma

OBJETIVO

Seen as traces or ghosts of a future we should be subjected to, we have been working on a series of deviations exercised on found objects such as the narrative condensation in Catherine Malabou's essay "Alienocene-Disjunction", illustrated in an image created for the exhibition Life and Prison (a collaboration between gta Exhibitions at ETH Zurich, e-flux Architecture and Catherine Malabou), Kazuo Shinohara's Prism House (1974), my earlier project The Room in Chiloé (1995), and the terrace of Hasedera temple in Nara, Japan. All of them are quoted in Prism House + Room/Terrace.
The images of the referenced buildings are collected on the slope of the natural terrain that lies beneath your feet. From there you can see the river of dead lava as a trace recalling the last eruption of the Llaima volcano nearby. This relationship to the landscape is perhaps the only real excuse for the encounter of these far-apart constructions. In a way, bringing these pieces together is not an exercise in interpretation but in repetition and replication; it's to do something for a second time without actually doing so, even if the gods and the honest architects grow angry, even if the attempt is continually thwarted.

CONTEXTO

The project relays on a flat platform that hovers over the steep mountain skirts around the Llaima Volcano. The sloping terrain runs freely underneath the terrace from where one can see the immense black lava landscape. Standing on this artificial, light ground, two sharp prisms manage to create a more intimate scale facing a remote and vast territory. At the same time, they build separated domestic realms in spite of their proximity.