Aerial Domesti.city

Aerial Domesti.city Public Machines by Alejandro Haiek Coll at: FESTIVAL DE ARQUITECTURA Y CIUDAD MEXTROPOLI, MEXICO CITY 2018.

The work raises 3 states, intervention, performance and disappearance.

The rules are as follows: There is no investment in infrastructure, the materials and components come from the construction industry, household items come from second-hand platforms (like craig list) or from the tradition of local manufacturing, whether it is borrowed or donated. The installation does not cost, it costs the effort. Everything comes from the industry and its technological obsolescence.

The work intercepts art, architecture, design, engineering, performance and storytelling, through a collaborative platform. It is an exercise of cooperative collective denounce that uses the city as an experimental urban laboratory for art and political installations.

It is built on machines, the construction machinery becomes a living space, devices where everyday life happens, manifest. It is built on machines, the construction is inhabited. It is built with what it builds. The works are instantaneous empowerment infrastructures, disobedient assemblies that develop a hybrid energy between the machine and human power. It is an installation that asks questions about the idealization of the modern domestic space, the ways of living in contemporary society, the policies of mass housing and the democratization of urban land.

They are semiotic interference exercises that ask questions to power. A mindful device, a critical artifact, a political apparatus. They are civic platforms of public denunciation that makes visible, shows, warns, records, document, map and exposes the domestic and private negotiation on everyday collective and individual life.

This 3rd intervention of the series public machines focus on domestic portable choreography specifically reconstructs the idea of a ‘home’ in a complex urban setting.

Resuming research such as Cushicle and Suitalone by Michael Webb (Archigram / 1967), speculations such as Wolke or The Cloud the Coop Himmelblau (Living form for the future / 1968) and “Oasis Nr. 7”from Viennese studio Haus-Rucker-Co (DOCUMENT /1972), the intervention exposes domestic identities through a performance by the dramaturge Heini Hölsenbaud, questioning the horizontal property and the value of urban land. The performance exposes everyday iterations with domestic identities and an inventory of traditional objects. The common and rich objects of Mexican housing culture and protocols of occupation: customs, myths and hybrid forms of contemporary life.

Identities extracted from their contexts and presented in the public sphere together associates with machines from demolitions and constructions sector. Domestic Choreographies raise awareness on where these objects come from, what is real the domestic and utilitarian value that they print to the space, even in this precarious condition, and, how they fit or couple with the new programmatic components of the house and reconfigure the dynamics.

Aerial Domesti.city belongs to the series portable scenographies, proposes hybrid street appropriation devices that developed domestic choreographies driven by social effervescent initiatives claiming civic rights, public demands and collective concerns

The platforms also represent and reveal the equivalent in area with respect to the cost of a square m2 of the real estate market before after the earthquake. Cubic meters versus square meters. There is no space available, nothing left over, from the spatial specificities to the programmatic plurality.

The machines provide as many configurations of the apartment as its technical instruments and performance allow. A bathroom is attached to a living room, a garden to a bedroom, or all are given in one: a dining room, a terrace, a balcony.

The dining room is a space to watch TV and do homework, the grandmother watches the novel, the clothes are washed in the shower. The clothes are iced in the sun. The machine copy Latin-American social behavior and provide support for forms of domesticity.

There are many apartments and there are none.

The installation is a minimal habitat assembled by autonomous, independent, flexible, incomplete, disobedient domestic cells.

They are associated in an intermittent and sometimes, also, random choreography.

The plant and section are dynamic and describe an ascending, zigzagging or alternating ritual.

The performance mirrored domestic patterns. There are no conditional ways of living, nor models of inhabiting taxes, nor the European Scandinavian furniture nor the North American family room have room for the least, the emergent, the resilient. Indian backpack, they are Mexican fetishism. At the same time that it explores and exposes intimacy, it becomes an inventory of attachment, an itinerary of everyday life.

The occupation became more homelike, affordable, comfortable. Between the industrial tools and domestic dynamics. It is inhabited from those everyday objects. The installation stages the inventory of household utensils and confronts them with the construction machinery. In that encounter, in that confrontation they become equally flexible and primitive. Customs and traditions are hybridized with construction protocols and lifting maneuvers.

Project by: Alejandro Haiek Coll of Pubic Machinery Art Installation at: Festival De Arquitectura y Ciudad Mextropoli 2018 Developing and Fabrication: Alejandro Tapia Project Team: Irina Urriola (Lab.Pro.Fab) Cristian Hernández (MANADA) General Coordination and Photography: Armando Quintana Performance: Heini Hölsenbaud Photography: Wendy Cabrera In collaboration with: Prosic, Huerto Roma Verde, Utilitario Mexicano Location: La Alameda. Historic center, Ciudad de México, Mexico Year: 2018

www.labprofab.org @the.public.machinery