Tropical Canonical – Liga 25

Tropical Canonical – Liga 25

For the installation of architecture: Tropical Canonical in LIGA DF, we wanted to build a space of confluences and spatial and reflexive experiences mediated by the idea and determination of the tropical space developed by our study throughout our work, as well as the construction of certain projective freedoms from a critical look at the fragmentation of historical narratives and their relationship with the contemporary illusion of locality, identity and site.

At the same time, we seek to ask ourselves about the possibility that architecture has to build global disciplinary cultural confluences, beyond the localities, but paradoxically making use of them, without abandoning the disciplinary domain that guarantees certain autonomy and technical and intellectual independence, not without denying the possibility of making a blurred field of discussion between architecture and its exhibition space porous, with the illusion of not touching the domain of art, and thus attempting to inhabit the restrictions and limits of the exposed architecture.

To this end, we consider crossing and contrasting some landmarks in the history of architecture such as the early 20th century silk textile architectures of Mies Van Der Rohe and Lili Reich for Samt Und Seide coffee in Berlin in 1927, and Aldo Van Eyck’s plant for the Sonsbeek pavilion, with realities and spatial values belonging to the tropics, references close to our practice, such as the idea of undefined space, long and elastic thresholds, close to the experience of walking through a forest .

The installation, built from layers of silk fabric, with flowers, trees and tropical shrubs, extracted from photographs of the garden of our studio and our home, occupies the difficult corner gallery of LIGA according to the floor of the Sonsbeek pavilion by Van Eyck. But contrary to the Dutch precedent, here the walls are soft, penetrable, even semi-transparent, creating a sense of deep space, not perspective, but structured by layers, contrasts of scales, and therefore multi- referential. Our purpose of making visible and experiencing in a mediated way the spatial structures of the tropics, are set in motion from the dilemma between the Van Eyck plant and the softness of the printed fabric, building in a direct but ambiguous way, the complexity and contradiction Venturiana of this and that, simultaneously: Solid / Soft, Porous / Hermetic, Static / Dynamic, Transparent / Opaque.