(43) MUSEU. 1999.

On the first of July 1999, five trucks transported five letters from Madrid to Castellón. The five letters had been built in white reinforced concrete, in the city of Madrid. The five trucks were the same, the five letters were different. The drivers carried telephones so that they could attend to the orders of the directors of the action. As they moved through the landscape and the towns, the five letters formed a word. The emergence of a word, an intruder, implies a culturization of landscape through thought. A culturization in motion that leaves no lasting mark. An ephemeral action, limited to four hundred and forty kilometres and ten hours of travel. Nature is what a person sees through experience. The task of art is to generate thoughts able to propose new experiences. The task of photography is not to represent or imitate what exists, but to summarize an experience. Therefore, the pictures of this travel reveal the process of a different experience –Just a few documents are left as a trace that freezes time, catalyses memory and at the same time challenges the disappearance of the ephemeral. The movement of the five letters on trucks must be understood as a “travel with weight”, reminding us of the mass of the earth that claims for itself everything that moves on its surface. The aim of this ephemeral installation has to do with the earth (two ways of colonizing: the gaze and the footprint) and with time (two ways of measuring: distance and movement). The emergence of these intruding letters, before the changing eyes of people, provokes a transformation of the different territories that are crossed by the road. A sort of spatial appropriation through the footprint and the gaze –a material confrontation between the language of the particular and the language of the universal. The continuous and accelerating frictions between the language of the particular and the language of the universal, between simultaneously being one and part of a group, inaugurate the moment of invisibility. The globalisation of culture and the respect to difference call for a wordless consensus. Today it is necessary to make ideas invisible, in order to clear the path for an architecture made from the frictions of living as presentation -not representation- of life… The architecture of tomorrow does not ask for forms, but for the marrow of forms, an architecture with a succinct body, just enough to stand up. If something characterizes today’s architecture, it is the architect’s capacity to explore and exploit, with a critical and ironic attitude, preferably with a sense of humour, the apparent restrictions and difficulties of the profession in our time. 

TECHNICAL DATA. Photographer: Luis Asín.