"Uncountable are the definitions that have been established throughout history regarding the city. Apart from the gathering of citizens which according to Aristotle determined the rise of the metropolis, or the place to talk and discuss described by Ortega y Gasset, when interpreting the city as the agora, Vigo is introduced as the place where different structures converge, where tradition somehow has undergone a process of industrialization leading it to become the most populous city of Galicia and among those with the biggest expansion over the last few decades.

Vigo's singularity and its ‘uncharacterised' architecture encouraged Carlos Bunga to research the strong transformation experienced by the city throughout the XX century. The work realised by the artist was organised in different stages, during which he met with citizens to gather opinions and data to help him understand the urban-planning evolution and the way it is planned on the margins of citizenship and dependant on economic, industrial or political needs. The results of the research process - drawings, collages, photographs and videos - work as documentation, as a ‘prelude' of a non existing conclusion, and provide thoughts on the concepts of production and consumption so closely linked to the city. The development of this research is not casual, since it is a clear example of the growth suffered by cities nowadays.

Aware that cities take part in the changes in History, and that crossed relationships are established there, Bunga defines the contemporary city as heterotopia, term coined by Michel Foucault in 1967, in order to substitute the historicist analysis which prevailed so far. Opposed to utopias, heterotopias are real places inside other places; confronted-places where town-planning redefinitions, social and economical conflicts are interwoven. In the artist's hands, the city becomes mouldable. He deconstructs it. With an aim to rationalise the urban context, the artist superimposes and mixes perspectives, points of view, local and peripheral stories.

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The exhibition is shown in a fragmented way, as a metaphor of the contemporary city, divided into series. One of the episodes is the result of the visits to libraries and newspaper libraries, originating in 20 drawings on paper reproducing pages of the newspaper Faro de Vigo, showing the evolution of the city through one its icons. The city, archive of memory, is linked to the idea of time, and the newspaper is here shown as a heterotopia in itself, superimposing perspectives, points of view and temporalities. Drawing these newspapers is, according to the artist, an attempt to rewrite History. Drawn and erased, the works show pieces of time or fragile memory, of the presence-absence of the architecture.

Time is, perhaps, the vertebrate in Carlos Bunga's works from his very early performances, questioning the concept of space and durability of objects. Actions developed in Manifesta 5 (San Sebastián, 2004), in Museu Serralves, Porto (EDP Award, 2003) or in Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid (2005) have the same background: thought on the transitory, the ephemeral thing that in Heterotopias becomes the leit-motiv. But what really matters to Carlos Bunga is the emptiness, the remaining absence, creating a new space. The artist himself refers to Schwitters' Merzbau constructions, or Matta Clark's Cuttings as the main referral of some actions that find their singularity in this ‘empty space'. In Basel Art Fair (2008) he showed in the section ArtUnlimited a piece which proved that work can be done from the nerve centre of the market while questioning it. Abandoning the spectacularity and grandiloquence was a challenge in a space conceived for visually attracting big names collector. The work, entitled Ruins, apart from evoking the space inside the space, consisted of the recreation of a non existing structure of a plan, a ‘dissected' structure. With this, it is the visitor who completes the meaning and the one who creates the spaces from the emptiness.

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In the proposal for MARCO, the series Tiempo ausente shows this big hole in a more obvious way. The artist tears in half photographs of different parts of the city and shows us the reality along with the imaginary projection, which acquires corporeity when reaching the viewer. Essayist and architect Fernando Chueca Goitia describes the city like frustration: ‘It has always been and will be, due to the nature of its essence, artistically fragmented, tumultuous and unfinished. The definite and round shape that aesthetic feelings long for cannot be found in it.' (F. Chueca Goitia, Breve historia del urbanismo, p. 37). The idea of leaving the result of the investigation in the hands of the atmosphere, the inhabitants and the connoisseurs of Vigo is like inventing a new relation between subjects. The artists is here an actor involved in the spatial, social and historical context, interpreting the city as a lab and its result as documentation.

The city is built and, given its assumed dynamic nature and its need for constant adaptation, every construction entails a destruction. How Does Your City Grow? is a narrative sequence of 24 photographs intervened by the artist, which insists into the relations between the city and the sea. Vigo's fast growth foresees a future of urbanization which invades a territory beyond its natural boundaries. In Una pequeña historia del Hotel Continental, Bunga summarises one of the most recent episodes of the History of Vigo. Built in the 70's, the Hotel Continental was a must. ‘Without any favour, the best in Galicia and one of the principal hotels in Spain', read an add published on a newspaper back in 1912. Right in the city's seafront, it welcomed visitors until it was demolished in the 60's. The disappearance of emblematic buildings in the city, frequent in many places but highly stressed in Vigo's case, has been gathered in the Vigo, la ciudad que se perdió, by historian Jaime Garrido. This publication, along with several other documents and books provided by Instituto de Estudios Vigueses, have been a guidance in the artist's research process.

The utopia of maintaining an organised city according to the dictations of reason, so Cartesian, collapses with the dispersion imposed by History. In the series entitled Plano ortogonal [Orthogonal Plan], composed by 3 works, the artist superimposes a grid cut out on vellum over black and white photographs of the city, therefore recalling the idea of the city of the XVII and XVIII centuries, the city of the grid, the geometrical city, opposed to the ‘busy', disorganised city linked to Capitalist economy.

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The performative part of this project reflects on other works in the exhibition. In the video Maqueta [Model], the sponge cake over which the chocolate is spread, in a never ending, hypnotising loop, shows the relationship between food and architecture, in which the artist has based part of his research. Beginning with a thought on the city's speed of change in a time of speculation or industrialization, Bunga decides to establish a relationship to food's durability. The objective of industrialization is consumption, a relationship the artist uses to make fun of that fugacity with which it is built. ‘The consumer society cherishes things which are made to be swallowed as quickly as possible. The biological need of the act of eating exists in the architectural field; it is comparable to the act of building', says the artist referring to works as Economically Desirable, Hemorroides [Haemorrhoids], Comida [Food] or Build with Your Food. ‘Among them I establish a relation between food wastes and the remains of a building that have once existed in a certain place.'

From an aesthetical point of view, the pieces look strange because of the impossible association of elements. Houses, by themselves, do not conform a city, which in order to exist require citizen participation, socialization and disputes. La cena [The Dinner] is the sound archive of a gastronomic meeting in which the guests were suggested several discussion themes and a time for discussion settled by the menu (Menú, 2009). For hours, the guests analysed issues like the urbanization plan of Samil urban beach, the building of the City Council of Vigo, the massive edification, the lost theatres and cinemas, the current state of the Panificadora or the urbanization plan ‘Abrir Vigo al mar' [Open Vigo to the Sea]. Their memories, opinions and comments provided the basis for this specific work by Carlos Bunga, realised for the city of Vigo, as a new example of the social dimension, of the extension of the artistic proposals beyond the museum's boundaries, which characterise the series ‘MEETING POINTS.'

Agar Ledo Arias
Curator of the exhibition