INFRATHIN ACTIONS
In architecture, urbanism and performance art
There are actions of weak nature which trigger profound transformations and changes in the architectural project or in the city. These actions can occur or surge spontaneously, sometimes leaving only a transient trace, or they can even be invisible, without physical presence and at the same time establish links, connections or drifts that humanize, transform and enrich the city and make it more inhabitable.
These actions, the weakest ones, those that approach the attribute of 'impresence', are those that, being invisible and incorporeal, radically transform urban life (of which the Internet or social networks would be just one of them). This family of actions, so far removed from the conventional project or conservative planning, is what is called with a word dear to Marcel Duchamp: inframince (infra-light).
We have seen that the ‘weak’ can only live in a sufficiently open field, where not everything is 'under control', since there, there would not be enough space for it to happen. In an open field the drifts and movements would not be linear, nor follow uniform patterns. In some ways, there is a conscious search for the loss of control, the erratic, the spontaneous.
From this perspective the city is not only the physical and palpable product of planning or of great infrastructures, in spite of the undeniable importance of both. Instead, this research tries to discover other possible, more contemporary forms of the ‘urban’ through the attentive look of artists, thinkers or architects (as noteworthy seismographers of changes). The focus is to investigate ideas of open qualities or new ways of using space, those, which can coexist with uncertainty, instability or indeterminacy. And therefore, distance themselves from the imposition of hard and hierarchical structures. This reveals a way of being, or of facing these issues which affect us all nowadays, and therefore also in the unavoidable approach to the contemporary architectural project and to urban planning.
The same happens with the architectural project. The open organization of the floor plan, the layering of paths or the models used to organize the brief show a change in the way of approaching the project, which will determine its ‘form’. The project is an open framework, a relational structure, with borders or contours that either have a tendency to expand to infinity or, on the contrary, to their dissolution or disappearance.
This research is approached from the context of the 60s and 70s. It is done by studying ‘weak actions’ in art and architecture such as the event, the ephemeral, the journey, the negation of the discipline, and even those things which have less presence, such as fragility, discontinuity, disappearance or indeterminacy.
The strategy to understand the process by which these actions have the capacity to function, and even to build a strong fabric, has to do with the infra-light. recognition of two distinct ideas (concepts, object, thoughts, events), even when these are separated by discontinuity or deferral in their logic. The recognition, even when irrational or without logic, is produced by an understanding (memory, intuition, etc.) of the minute gap which separates these ideas
In this way, unintelligible and intangible ideas are transformed into visual or sensorial references that depend only on evocation or memory.
This way unintelligible and intangible ideas are transformed into visual or sensorial references that rely solely on memory, becoming abstract notions and beautifully defining the je ne sais quoi.