BUILDING CITIES  © 1999

Building Cities, constitutes the cartography of an experience, of a journey and, ultimately, of a memory. Rome was drawn as an accumulation of layers, of strata, of times, of places and of history; in short, it was an archaeology of superposition, a discontinuity in time.

Building Cities was conceived within the framework of the experience of living four months at the Spanish Academy in Rome; the journey of discovering another culture, other people, other places; and the memory of capturing three-dimensionally the experiences lived and the memories of a here and now.  In that fragmentation of the unfinished, of what was left behind by the passage of time, in that stratification, was where I found the essence of Rome, its deepest character. Accumulation of ruins, reiteration of orders, difference of times, spatial disconnection are some of the adjectives with which I would define my work in Rome.

I imagined a system of quartieres (neighborhoods), receptacles of experiences, habitats of memory that would reflect those labyrinthine and organic voids of the medieval zone through which I had traveled. I used a wax skin for the interior of my containers, like the city that folds in on itself to become more intimate, more human and accessible. An archaeological epidermis that continuously repeating itself describes in its variations the Roman tessuto. Apparently soft and fragile, and at the same time warm, the wax describes the bowels of the city; that city imagined in our memory, delicate and weak that needs to be protected by an external shell, rigid and resounding, made of lead.  The choice of materials is never casual, each material has its time, its rules and its historical baggage; in this way it is able to speak to us of the past or the present, to tell us something.  Rome fundamentally represented time, history and warmth.

CREDITS ::

Conceptualization: Esther Pizarro
Production: Esther Pizarro

Project realized in the frame of the Scholarship of Plastic Arts of the Spanish Academy in Rome with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

EXHIBITED IN ::

Spanish Academy in Rome. "Scholarship holders Rome 1998-99". Italy. 17/06/1999 to 18/07/1999
Academy of San Fernando. "Rome 1998-99 fellows". Madrid. 15/09/1999 to 29/09/1999
Raquel Ponce Gallery, "Building Cities", Madrid. 27/01/2000 a 25/03/2000

ASSOCIATED CATALOG ::

Pizarro, Esther (2000). Exhibition catalog: Construir Ciudades. Texts: Esperanza López Parada, Esther Pizarro. Edited by: Raquel Ponce Gallery, Editorial Grafur, Madrid. Length: 56 pages. Language: Spanish-English. Format: 21,5x28,5 cm. Binding: paperback. DL: M-2324-2000

AAVV (1999). Catalog exhibition: Academia de España Roma 1999. Text: Felipe Garín Llombart. Edited by: Academy of Spain Rome. Length: 136 pages. Language: Spanish.  Sponsored by: Madrid City Hall and Caja Madrid Foundation within the Velázquez-Calderón Commemorative Program 1999-2000. DL: M-34787-1999