The city grows in the territory on horizontal and vertical layers. Until 18th century, most of our cities have grown as the translation of our culture and our way of socialization in a natural and organic process. This phenomenon has changed dramatically in recent times, and now cities are planned according to changing concepts of the city added to the effects of globalization. This traumatic reality is reversing this process.
Now it is the cities that we build that define our culture and mode of socialization, and not the other way around, making the world increasingly uniform, while our urban spaces become areas of experimentation where our local identity has to fight against predefined patterns of efficiency and economic and social standards. All these processes are happening locally, but all over the world and in a uniform way.
In the vertical plane, the city is stratified by uses, but they all have in common the original layer of the land itself where topography and the earth tell us about the past and also clues about the future. This is the reason why the soil will be the material that I will use to question this complex reality.
The paintings used in this installation are natural pigments extracted by hand from various parts of the Iberian Peninsula. As a contemporary version of cave painting, I have made sprays with which I have drawn the footprint of Madrid, using the different types of urban patterns in the city to talk about how different types of developments involve different types of ways of socializing. The project proposes an organic development in which the city and the mural evolve spontaneously and adapt to the space and not the other way around.
The fact of working with natural pigments and natural alcohol makes this work totally impermanent. As part of the concept, time turns cities into a system in natural evolution, which changes with time and climate, and the mural will change with rain, wind, and interaction with people. The mural will turn to dust over time, as it is dust where it came from.
Pigment collection process
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