Pascuala Campos de Michelena | Ana Gallego Palacios
La conversación

The architects Pascuala Campos de Michelena (Jaén, 1942) and Ana Gallego Palacios (Cáceres, 1977) think, project and inhabit the spaces. Their careers include researches and actions to decode the nature of experiences and emotions which take place in the spaces: but they also elucidate the meanings of these spaces, with the help of the tools offered by the architecture itself, and in mutual understanding with Philosophy and Art. The site-specific intervention planned for the Annex at MARCO shows a phenomenological space in which one can feel and imagine the vulnerability of the inhabited spaces, one can think about the way they can be experienced, legitimised, shared. Inside the museum, this intention occurs in collision with visual arts, and —together—, they activate a new stage of existence, which runs parallel between the real ad the figurative spaces.

The exhibition layout generates a place for transition, but also for congregation. The visitor, which surrounds the central body, is invited to wander and stroll around the created atmosphere. Right after crossing the threshold of the gallery, the visitor suddenly steps into a sandy floor which inevitably reminds of a beach. Nevertheless —now more than never— it becomes ground of exile, of escape, of vital drama and death. Located in the middle of the gallery space, a structured made out of burel canvas embraces two little confronted chairs, anxious for dialogue. Little wooden clothespins hang over the chairs. These fierce everyday, simple objects are also strongly charged with symbolism; they tell us about women, household tasks. They are a sort of magical devices which act as gripping items, as elongations of our own hands. The ensemble comes together with a image of a conversation to come —which didn’t taken place but it should have. And from this painful, totally subjective point of departure, a new collective experience comes up; private moments and external realities join together, encouraged by an urgent need for reflection about the relations and ways of communication from —and opposite to— our own cultural, social and political reality.

The architects intertwine an organic, permeable and temporary space which flows and changes depending on the perception of each visitor. It is a projected landscape which activates a new emotional and subjective rhythm, through the essential usage of objects, materials and light. It is also a physical, corporal experience which is on the border, just as words are, from which to re-vindicate and commit themselves to identity, memory and politics, with territory and gender. Cross the threshold of intuition of oneself, both inside and outside. Demonstrate pertinence or estrangement by reflecting on personal exile, something which is now especially sensitive and problematic for collective exiles.

An interaction between architectural language and visual arts takes place in this proposal with the intention of showing the basic dynamisms of subjectivity itself when trying to create a meaning —to build our world with a critical attitude towards our own being inside the space. The collaboration in the mobility of the borders of invention and creation results in a pretty suggestive outcome arising from two architects working together. Two different poetics merge in the ethics of the work and in an intuitive understanding of the space. Hence, the gallery eases the creation of a unspoken discourse which stimulates debate: to assume a place to stay, a place to become.

Chus Martínez Domínguez