Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Frío Estudio del Desastre, 2005

Installation view: Passages. Travels in Hyperspace. Works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, 2010
Photo: Reto Guntli

Collection

Cinder blocks, concrete, fishing nylon
Dimensions site specific

Los Carpinteros' Frío Estudio del Desastre (Frozen Study of a Disaster) plays on the uncanny representation of space as a disembodied picture of reality by presenting what appears to be a three-dimensional reconstruction of a photographic image depicting an exploding wall. Shattered fragments from a cinder block wall hang suspended in the air, while a gaping hole in the wall indicates the point of impact of the blast responsible for this domestic ground zero. The visitor walks through this eerie scene as if somehow entering and navigating a two-dimensional representation, a forensic image from which we may reconstruct the specific nature of the forces unleashed by the detonation.

As an image of architectural vulnerability, Frío Estudio del Desastre inevitably calls to mind pictures of the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2011, an event experienced around the world through its depictions in the media. Yet for all its evocation of a mortal disaster, Los Carpinteros' installation conspicuously lacks any trace of human inhabitants; the space it presents is devoid of history, a frozen temporal vacuum. It hints at the way that our photographically conditioned perception limits our experience not only of space but also of time. "With the advent of modernity, time has vanished from social space", historian Henri Lefebvre observed in his pioneering book "The Production of Space" from 1974.

Marco Antonio Castillo Valdés: *1971 in Camagüey, Cuba | Living and working in La Habana, Cuba and Madrid, Spain
Dagoberto Rodríguez Sánchez: *1969 in Caibarien, Cuba | Living and working in La Habana, Cuba and Madrid, Spain