Collapse
A temporary art installation at Plaça dels Dolors in Tortosa for A Cel Obert Festival.
A Cel Obert is a festival for temporary art installations at historic landmarks of the city of Tortosa (Catalunya, Spain). For the seventh edition, due to the Covid-19 breakdown, the teams' proposal directed by Cristina Bestratén was an edition in transition, a moment to think about the notion of “pause” through an installation and a retrospective exhibition.
The site chosen by the festival is the old Church of Dolors, in the historic center of Tortosa. Destroyed during the Spanish civil war, its monumental arcades, the six side-chapels and the main entrance in ruins coexist in a unique public space.
Collapse refers to this condition of ruin. A material gesture that seeks to freeze a specific instant: the breaking down of a wall.
Collapse is a peculiar moment in matter transformation. The structural efforts, invisible to the naked eye, show their natural tendencies, falling to the ground. Through a subtle interplay of forces, the installation presented as a fragile equilibrium freezes that precise instant. An inclined plane where heavy becomes light and transitory turns stable. A moment suspended in time that means to reveal the poetics of balance.
The wall is made from one hundred and twenty dunnage airbags usually used to secure loads in transport containers. The production starts from an overlay of ten rows sewn in the workshop formed by an irregular bonding. The design dismisses the traditional form of building masonry walls by adding pieces, to propose a rise propelled by air, inflated from below, up to seven meters.
On Sunday, the installation was forced to collapse in a public event that announced the festival coming to an end. The tensions accumulated are released in an action that breaks the frozen image of the wall. Collapse is a counter-monument that questions the ruins immersed in an apparent state of pause.
Collapse is an installation by Martillo Neumático that, at this festival, was carried out by: Roman Sost, Mon Cano, Jerome Lorente and Iñigo Barrón together with Javier Gutierrez and Ines Miño, Cesar Fuentes, Ana Moure, Javier Bilbao, Jorge Aguirrezabal, Mikel Quintana, Jesús Escudero, Blanca Arcos, Matteo Caro and Alvaro Regatero.
