Palimpsests
This process can start with two main readings talking about two different important topics that ended up on two different palimpsests.
The first text called "Reckoning with ruins" by Tim Ederson and Caitlin DeSilvey published in 2012.
Abstract :
"Scholarly interest in ruins and derelict spaces has intensified over the last decade". The authors assess a broad selection of the resulting literature and identify several key themes such as cultural value, dereliction, materiality or memory. This was a complex text to read such as it also treats about how ruins may be used to criticise capitalism and manifestations of power; about the way in which ruins may question our relations to the past; etc.
Related to this text and mainly to the third chapter ‘ruin memory : other times, other histories’, the “ruins serve as emblematic sites at which to re-examine and recast our relationship with the past, and our understandings of temporality”. That is why it would be good to analyse “how people live with and within the ruins” and under what conditions the site has been abandoned. The question is to know if the site is a testimony or a simple abandon, and in that case, we should find its reasons.
As a result, I linked this lecture with the jail’s walls, which form the first palimpsest. Whether inside or outside, the walls have been marked by the time spent and also by the prisoners or the citizens.
I wanted to do a detail ‘new to old’ which damage the least possible the walls, to respect the site and its state at the time, Thus , I wanted to make the intervention reversible. This idea with the timber beams could be easily removable and is adjustable to reinforce the structure and let the walls intact.
I had also the idea of giving power to this old concrete by contrasting it with another concrete or another material by contrasting their colour.
1New to Old details
The second text called "Cultural Identity and Architecture : Finding one's bearings in the labyrinth" written by Rafael E. J. Iglesia.
An identity is proper to each country, place, religion, population, group, family or individual. It inspired me an interesting link to the skin, which is a fabulous and universal palimpsest. Each skin is different, unique but each individual on this planet own one. Such as the first one (the jail's walls), the skin marks the time passing and every evenment that marked physically a life.
The support is its colour, its fingerprints or its pores, and the writing would be the wrinkles (mark of time), the scars (which relate a story or an event) or the stretch marks. So these are some natural writings, but they are superimposed by all the non natural ones (tattoos, pen ink, make up, etc.).
It is possible to develop a reflection about the argentine cultural identity to attempt to create in a fairer way taking into account different elements : after my research for the website, I’ve learnt that most of the argentine population is descendent of European immigrants (Italy, Spain and France mainly).
This has had an impact on the fine arts (1860 : Italian influences / impressionism, realism, etc. then cubism, futurism), on the politics but also on the architecture. Argentina was searching for their own style, and is used to take inspiration on European culture, as las Galerias Pacifico can show it, with some neoclassicism and French gothic notes, neglecting unfortunately the indigenous one.
→ For example, during the colonisation, a large proportion of indigenous artwork have been destroyed due to the Spanish Conquistadors wish to convert the indigenous people to Catholicism
This gave me the idea to try to analyse the process of copy or inspiration from European architecture and try to translate that process from Indigenous architecture and way of living. The mix of the two inspirations, one for the process, the other one from the proper architecture, would maybe a good participation to a cultural identity research.
It would be a reversed palimpsest : the writing is the same but the support is different : usually, this process is written on the European culture basis, and we would try to write the same thing on the indigenous support.
→ The architect Severiano Mário Porto – or architect of the forest - is credited for designing a unique model of sustainable Amazonian architecture. He takes inspiration from native architecture from the amazon
→ The architect Claudio Caveri also worked on this : he was part of the movement of Casablanquismo which takes inspiration from primitive colonial architecture mixed with vanguard European influences of the time
2Latin America architectural identity
