ONE FIRE, 2023
Numbererd wood flooring, mdf.
The exhibition One Fire is built on the full awareness of the urgency of its materialization.
In the flow of his wanderings through the inaccessible geography of the city, the artist enters an old bourgeois house in Porto which, like so many others, is destined for demolition in a processof real estate speculation. Inside, he noticed that the house had been occupied by one (or more) homeless people.
There were visible marks on the wooden floor from a fire, probably used for heating. These marks thus assumed a dystopian dimension in relation to the possible memory of parties, gatherings and socializing of a typical, wealthy family
nucleus from times gone by.
From there, Ruben Santiago decided to draw up a work plan that turned that space into an unusual atelier. The goal was set: to remove all the wooden tiles from the floor and put them back in a place devoted to contemporary art.
Working hours would have to be carefully adjusted to the clandestine nature of the operation. The heavy silence was a tribute to the emptiness that would be created there.
The piece One fire 1.1 thus takes on a very peculiar thickness in its presentation at Sismógrafo; an act of courage, of critical positioning and procedural obstinacy, it lives off its anti-spectacularism to anchor itself in a distressing level of reception. To walk through it is to step into the very core of history, especially of all the untold histories of the urban mutations we are frantically witnessing today, sometimes in complicit silence, sometimes in discouraged helplessness.
There are many ghostly presences: the original owners, the homeless person who left the fire marks, the artist who, to carry out the work, had to bet on maximum invisibility.
In his mind, the linguistic peculiarity of the fact that, in Portuguese, the word fogo (fire) also refers to a housing unit constantly resonated. This coincidence, revealed in his parallel research into housing cooperatives, underlines the strangeness of his gesture.
In a second piece, A lock is the weakest link, two images of padlocks are shown, padlocks just like so many others that close the entrance to uninhabited houses. Symbols of the private that aggressively permeate the public space and, paradoxically, invite to transgression to a certain extent, as they are a sign of precarious building security.
The artist appropriated two of these padlocks and, through a process of electrolysis, decomposed them into iron oxide, which in the exhibition can be seen in two small glass ampoules.
The memory of the boundaries between public and private is thus reified in aesthetic objects that conflict with the composition traditions of the disciplines in the field of art.
Here, it is the process that prevails over the result, it is this ability for a deviant mnemonic that validates the absolute relevance of the form.
ONE FIRE, 2023
Numbererd wood flooring, mdf.
The exhibition One Fire is built on the full awareness of the urgency of its materialization.
In the flow of his wanderings through the inaccessible geography of the city, the artist enters an old bourgeois house in Porto which, like so many others, is destined for demolition in a processof real estate speculation. Inside, he noticed that the house had been occupied by one (or more) homeless people.
There were visible marks on the wooden floor from a fire, probably used for heating. These marks thus assumed a dystopian dimension in relation to the possible memory of parties, gatherings and socializing of a typical, wealthy family
nucleus from times gone by.
From there, Ruben Santiago decided to draw up a work plan that turned that space into an unusual atelier. The goal was set: to remove all the wooden tiles from the floor and put them back in a place devoted to contemporary art.
Working hours would have to be carefully adjusted to the clandestine nature of the operation. The heavy silence was a tribute to the emptiness that would be created there.
The piece One fire 1.1 thus takes on a very peculiar thickness in its presentation at Sismógrafo; an act of courage, of critical positioning and procedural obstinacy, it lives off its anti-spectacularism to anchor itself in a distressing level of reception. To walk through it is to step into the very core of history, especially of all the untold histories of the urban mutations we are frantically witnessing today, sometimes in complicit silence, sometimes in discouraged helplessness.
There are many ghostly presences: the original owners, the homeless person who left the fire marks, the artist who, to carry out the work, had to bet on maximum invisibility.
In his mind, the linguistic peculiarity of the fact that, in Portuguese, the word fogo (fire) also refers to a housing unit constantly resonated. This coincidence, revealed in his parallel research into housing cooperatives, underlines the strangeness of his gesture.
In a second piece, A lock is the weakest link, two images of padlocks are shown, padlocks just like so many others that close the entrance to uninhabited houses. Symbols of the private that aggressively permeate the public space and, paradoxically, invite to transgression to a certain extent, as they are a sign of precarious building security.
The artist appropriated two of these padlocks and, through a process of electrolysis, decomposed them into iron oxide, which in the exhibition can be seen in two small glass ampoules.
The memory of the boundaries between public and private is thus reified in aesthetic objects that conflict with the composition traditions of the disciplines in the field of art.
Here, it is the process that prevails over the result, it is this ability for a deviant mnemonic that validates the absolute relevance of the form.