22.10.2018 - 21.01.2019
Co-edited with Ruth Estévez
Since the colonial era up until the present day, urban centres in Latin America have been developed under a homogenizing vision of civilization, which was later updated by ideals of modernity and progress joint to a developmentalist logic. Complementing the violence of Colony’s urban layout and its territorial spoliation, architectural design, based on Modernism, updates the Western vision regarding the relationship between body and space.
The title of this new issue of the magazine refers to Beatriz Colomina’s seminal text The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism. A text where the researcher understands architecture as “a gaze mechanism that produces subjects”, and where the act of building is never neutral, configuring issues of gender and domination through the construction of space itself.
Through the gaze, architectural Modernism acquired the redefinition of the relationship between exterior and interior, between the domestic and the public, the intimate and the social, thus stressing individualism and spectacle. Nowadays, the fields of architecture, urban and territorial planning perpetuate the hegemony of the real estate and financial capital and its effects of segregation, exploitation, and inequality. Under the guise of functionality and individual welfare, architecture hides the collateral damage of a developmental principle that reproduces in itself ignoring the exterior; thus, gentrification, waste, displacement, destruction, and violence continue to set the standard of what is built. How can architects critically carry out their practice establishing a space for dialogue to dislocate the exercises of capitalist power?Under what criteria of work can they establish honest processes where architecture functions in favor of those who inhabit it? To what extent can personal taste prevail over collective requirements? How can we think of architecture from an active heterogeneity that is capable of connecting the past and the future in order to maintain a hybrid present?
In this edition of Terremoto, we reflect together with architects, artists, and theorists about the way in which they build and consider structures to accommodate, organise and influence in human life as well as the forms of resistance that contribute to destabilise the foundations of the neoliberal system. From all the details, we look at cities and towns, real and mental spaces, horizons, and undergrounds from both a critical and caring perspective to understand the battle played out between bodies and concrete.
13
2018
13 2018
22.10.2018
Issue 13: The Split Wall
Jorge Lobos, Andrea Pacheco
Andrea Pacheco converses with Jorge Lobos about architecture as a human right and the need to develop a praxis geared towards social equality in order to step away from the logic of power that sustains the field.
13 2018
29.10.2018
Issue 13: The Split Wall
Mónica Chuji
Mónica Chuji, a Kichwa activist from the Ecuadorian Amazon, demonstrated the failure of the discourses of modernity and development in order to call on everyone to urgently listen to the knowledge of «Sumak Kawsay», in turn escaping the productivist vision that is killing us.
13 2018
05.11.2018
Issue 13: The Split Wall
Godofredo Enes Pereira
As architecture is an elementary part of the socioenvironmental ecologies in which we live, Godofredo Pereira analyzes the responsibility that architectural practice has for achieving a more dignified, common and just world dwelling.
13 2018
12.11.2018
Issue 13: The Split Wall
Marina Reyes Franco
As part of an investigation into the Caribbean visitor economy, curator Marina Reyes Franco contextualizes architectural and urban development in Puerto Rico as part of a politics of tourism indifferent to the community which resists it.
13 2018
19.11.2018
Issue 13: The Split Wall
Iván L. Munuera
Iván L. Munuera writes about the urbanistic ecosystem of Havana, stopping at the Coppelia ice cream shop as an allegory of the relationship between architecture and geopolitics.
13 2018
26.11.2018
Issue 13: The Split Wall
Fernando Portal
Fernando Portal recapitulates two of his research centered in the reconstruction of a documentary body, since the seventies, of material culture and exhibition practices of architecture in Chile.
13 2018
03.12.2018
Issue 13: The Split Wall
CALDODECULTIVO, Vere van Gool
Associate Director of the New Museum’s «IdeasCity» initiative, Vere van Gool interviews CALDODECULTIVO co-founder Gabriela Córdoba Vivas about the collective’s work redefining architecture from a focus on people and community.
13 2018
10.12.2018
Issue 13: The Split Wall
Laura Burocco
From the cases of Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg, Laura Burocco analyzes the impact that as knowledge workers we exercise on our urban environment through gentrification processes anchored to a colonial logic.
13 2018
17.12.2018
Issue 13: The Split Wall
Dorothée Dupuis
Dorothée Dupuis, Editor-in-Chief of Terremoto, reflects on the tensions that exist between the museum space and the artist-run space as architectures that allow the exercise of cultural policies.
13 2018
07.01.2019
Issue 13: The Split Wall
Elisa Silva
Elisa Silva develops a reflection that reexamines informal settlements from the possibilities that these offer to create public spaces and fight social inequality in the process of a more inclusive urbanism.
13 2018
14.01.2019
Issue 13: The Split Wall
Lia García (La Novia Sirena), Tadeo Cervantes
Tadeo Cervantes, architect and historian, talks with Lia García about her artistic work and her quest to frustrate the proxemics that defines public space and its consequent individual and distant construction among the bodies that inhabit it.
13 2018
21.01.2019
Issue 13: The Split Wall
María Berríos, Ruth Estévez
A dialogue between Ruth Estévez and María Berríos about the Valparaíso School of Architecture and the exhibition «Del Tercer Mundo» held in Havana, Cuba, as well as their value as historical landmarks for the concept of collaboration and the questioning of authorship.