Sunday 6 September 2015

Iosu Arambaru + Le Corbusier

 





The arriving transatlantic liners, 2013.

This project was first developed during a residency at La Ene, in Buenos Aires.
It consists on a video installation showing a fragment of a Soviet musical movie, Cheryomushki (1963), where two young couples sing and dance in front and around an imaginary housing project. The video is shown inverted on a vintage TV which is placed on top of a mirror platform on the floor.
The starting point of the installation is a plan developed by Le Corbusier for Buenos Aires throughout the 30’s, and especially an idea that haunted him since his first glance of Buenos Aires in 1929: To move the business center from the old city to the middle of the river. This “cité des affaires” with rational, clean, magnificent structures build upon a concrete platform was a space where the city would open “in full light, in full freedom, in full joy” and where you could see the “arrival of the transatlantic liners and airplanes” . It was the arrival of a European modernity to a city and a continent with the possibility to build a new world, planed and rational. When the plan for Buenos Aires was developed and finally published in the 1940’s modernity had to be built from scratch. An economically flourishing Latin America could be the right place to start doing so.
 

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