Marlon de Azambuja, cement and sensation

Madrid,

It is common, in Marlon de Azambuja’s production, to test the possibilities of construction materials to provoke readings, open to the viewer, about our ways of inhabiting or understanding the world; also about the power of individual creation when modifying, even if it is ephemeral – or precisely for that reason – certain urban spaces and furniture.

Starting from given scenarios – both public and open-air as well as exhibitions – this Brazilian artist imagines microcosms capable of opening up new perceptual options for the public: he is interested in finding in them what has not yet been discovered, elucidating the stories that remain to be born there, what (happy) images they could generate.

His most recent exhibition in Madrid has just been presented at La Casa Encendida, curated by Bruno Leitão: located in one of its towers, accessible from the roof, it consists of a single sculptural installation that completely occupies the available surface. Its title is Foundation because he wants to awaken sensations around the act of founding a place, but the artist wants to give primacy to the experiences of visitors in the place with respect to his discourse.

He has sought to transform the room into a living environment, completely covered by cement that generates irregular reliefs except on one side, where steps have been drawn with the same material, with the aim of encouraging conversation and making the spectators part of the project in a natural way.

Marlon de Azambuja. Foundation. The House on

His intervention is simple and devoid of any other color other than that of the material itself, but it completely transforms our vision of the place. These choices are not due so much to aesthetic issues, but to the very notion of found that this author handles: Azambuja does not think of building in search of heights, but rather of attending to the foundation or base, a base that we will always find looking down, towards that which sustains and conditions the being of the rest.

By moving our gaze not to what is accessory and designed in second place, but to what is underground, the artist claims that the materials on which we step and build cannot be approached as mere neutral supports, but as a source of memory and language. A source that conditions our way of seeing and also discusses the usual limits between knowledge and emotions when contemplating. What you arrive here will be able to see in this kind of cement pond will be a sea in its waves, the uncertain magma of a strange era or a humid and disorderly land; For this author, good works, like a mirror, give you back what you carry inside. And its good perception comes from direct experience.

More than disseminating ideas, Azambuja cement is there to create them, in its visual force – arising, in the end, from a minimal gesture -, its density and its unhidden frictions, which do not respond to any form of linearity; as well as in its contrast with an enigmatic square box with a circle inside, like Kubrick’s black monolith in the desert. And in its ultimate sense, this piece also proposes (between the sculptural, the installation and the spatial intervention) to conceive exhibitions in an institution, not as a form of representation, but as a practice that should give rise to talks, listening and new fruits.

In the coming months, this proposal – intentionally unstable – will be activated through interventions, meetings and conversations that will be a fundamental part of the installation’s own development. These processes will give rise to records—textual, performative and material—that will be physically and gradually added to the exhibition space, incorporating themselves as new layers. These activations will be led by Dima Srouji, Palestinian architect and artist; Edgar Calel, Guatemalan artist and poet; and Claudia Segura, current head of the MACBA Collection.