TYPOLOGY: Exhibition
CREDITS: In partnership with Miguel Mesa and Paisajes Emergentes
YEAR: 2009
LOCATION: Medellín, Colombia
CLIENT: Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín and Museo de Antioquia
We were commissioned to design Medellín Mayor’s office exhibition for the 50th BID assembly. They asked us to represent the recent transformation of the city under several requirements: to make an itinerant open air show, resistant to sun, rain an lateral winds of 150km/h. It shouldn’t weight more than 400 kg per m2 as it was to be placed over the main room of the convention center.
They asked for a typical museum hall, a neutral container that would not compete with the works exhibited. The show had to include ten video monitors, supply networks and receive six thousand people in three days -after which it would be open to the public. In addition, we had to follow a script that covered from the development of the urban area of Medellín to the mafia violence. From the subway to the social urbanism of Sergio Fajardo and future plans. The pavilion had to be ready to be open in 40 days, including installation work.
We proposed a pavilion that would not aim at representing the city change but at constituting a new and singular space for it.
We wanted to inscribe our project in the frame of some of our interests about contemporary culture: performativity, recycling, fast undertakes and the match between the natural anthem artificial. To this purpose we thought of an industrial object we believe materially suitable and turn it upside down. Distributing the script in ten water tanks of 10.000 liters capacity each and making holes in the tanks with a cutter machine we could turn them into capsules and receive the public in.
The tanks endure weather, had low weight, resisted the strong winds, had malleable interiors, protected the screens and servers to support graphic information. During the day, the sun ray would dim when hitting the tank surface providing homogeneous light, but temperature was an issue to solve -as it could rise a lot during the afternoon- and night illumination as well. On one part, we chose to cover the tanks with vegetation and installed humidifier systems; on the other, we opted for an illumination system based on led tubes attached to the cover.
