Part of the "Tools" series of Abstractions.
Images always tell stories. Sometimes they deal with tales of economic logics and marketing, such as computer screens flooded with pop-up ads; often they are more prosaic, as a familiar history told through the lens of your aunt’s collection of photographs in silver frames.
This tension between endless successions of superseded images generated through obscure algorithms and carefully crafted collections is at the heart of modern architectural discourse: confronted with an ever-growing pool of referents, there is an unavoidable need to categorise, to develop obsessions from isolated fragments.
The project aims to create a hedonic and personal world, imagined from an atlas of situations that for any unknown reason, might seem appealing. Overlapping personal images with pieces of art, imaginary places and allsorts of pictorial references reveal connections between pieces in a self-reflective effort to understand our own affinities and phobias. Unifying them through one of the simplest graphic conventions, black line drawings over white backgrounds, wecan strip them of dispensable connotations such as authorship, medium or age, enabling for a more personal approach to their relations.
Affinities are made explicit by means of juxtaposing these images: those providing us with a haptic impression can be assembled, thus making a small scene of The Garden of Earthly Delights edge closer to a photograph of a seemingly unnoticed building in a small street of Montevideo. The convergence these stamps requires analysing not only their relationship among themselves (and with us), but also their spatial properties, from dimensions to the viewpoint and perspectives used.
As a result, the original images start morphing, either asking for more or less detail. When put together, some grey areas - those belonging to no particular image - emerge, creating a complete image of domestic hedonism, or rather, a variation of such, indissolubly tied to its author.
The project participated to the Limit/less Archive competition.
