Non vogliamo mettere in discussione il lavoro di ricerca dei venezuelani di Urban Think Tank, Alfredo Brillenbourg e Hubert Klumpner che ben conoscono le condizioni di Caracas, ne tantomeno le fotografie di Iwan Baan, bensì le motivazioni della Giuria della 13° Biennale di Architettura di Venezia al Leone d’Oro assegnato al padiglione “Torre David/Gran Horizonte”.
“La giuria elogia gli architetti per aver riconosciuto la potenza di questo progetto trasformazionale: una comunità spontanea ha creato una nuova casa e una nuova identità occupando Torre David, e lo ha fatto con talento e determinazione. Questa iniziativa può essere intesa come un modello ispiratoreche riconosce la forza delle associazioni informali”, questo è il comunicato ufficiale della giuria della 13° Biennale "Common Ground".
Sono queste parole che rimbombano in un mare di dubbi e lasciano molti interrogativi: conoscono, i giurati o il direttore, Caracas e la Torre con le condizioni di vita?, Hanno espresso un giudizio consapevole oppure sono stati inebriati dall’atmosfera piacevole del bar Gran Horizonte allestito nel padiglione venezuelano? E con questo riconoscimento cosa hanno voluto realmente premiare, il padiglione, gli squatter o la ricerca e la fotografia?
Già nel marzo 2011 il New York Times aveva dedicato un report e un video, da vedere, che documentava la storia e la vita nella Torre David, un caso unico al mondo. Se per la giuria, che probabilmente non ha letto l'rticolo del NYT, la Torre David è un “modello ispiratore” si vuole dimostrare come un pezzo di città non pianificata può funzionare come quelle fatte da architetti e talvolta meglio, e quindi il premio va assegnato moralmente agli squatter. Non abbiamo una risposta certa ma, nella profonda perplessità, abbiamo avuto la necessità di pubblicare un articolo sulla “Torre de David” scritto da Félix Suazo nel 2010, per capire di cosa si parla e cosa viene premiato alla Biennale.
E lo pubblichiamo interamente per il rispetto dell’autore e per avere un quadro esaustivo che ovviamente potrebbe esserci dato da altri giornalisti e scrittori che documentano le vicende del Venezuela, della sua capitale Caracas e della “Torre de David”.
Sul blog, da cui è tratto lo scritto di Félix Suazo, di Ángela Bonadies e Juan José Olavarría, intervistati nel 2011 da Domus, i commenti in merito sono molto interessanti e pungenti e vi invitiamo a leggerli per capire il sentimento e lo stupore dei venezuelani, così come la spiegazione pubblicata dallo stesso gruppo di Urban Think Tank poco prima della Biennale.
Appearances Are Not Deceptive By Félix Suazo
In 1990 building began on the Centro Financiero Confianzas Tower, one of the highest buildings in Caracas at 195 meters and 45 floors high. However, the Tower was left unfinished in 1994 amid a serious banking crisis that sent its owners into bankruptcy. Since that time, the building -- also known as David's Tower, in an allusion to its owner David Brillembourg -- was taken over by the State institution Fondo de Garantía de Depósitos y Protección Bancaria (Fogade)1. In October 2007, a group of homeless families invaded the building2, and in June 2009 they formed the cooperative entitled Cooperativa Cacique Venezuela R.L.3, which was run by a character nicknamed El Niño.
Government authorities have maintained a doubly ambiguous position towards the future administration of the Tower4, as well as regards to the inhabitants who live in it illegally, because they have neither taken any steps to evict the squatters, nor to guarantee them with a more comfortable dwelling. In fact, the Venezuelan State's housing plans are still highly deficient, as some 2,500,000 homes are needed to cover demand, according to official figures from the National Statistics Institute (INE, in Spanish)5.
Despite its monumental height and downtown location, the striking David's Tower -- which "for now"6 is run by El Niño -- represents a further empty space on Caracas' irregular urban topography. At only 60 per cent completed and with no elevators or basic services installed, the building has become a sort of "luxury shanty", whose function and legal status remain hazy as it is put to a use that it was not designed for. After featuring as a symbol of a corporative empire, the towering structure that faces the public is now an emblem of precariousness and abandonment.
That the current inhabitants' hopes for a place to live are hinged upon this failure confronts us the repeatedly anomalous behavior that affects all levels of social and productive activity in Venezuela. Other Caracas buildings that were of similar note at their time, such as the Helicoide, the Humboldt Hotel or, more recently, the Sambil shopping center in La Candelaria, were unable to fulfill their original purpose and have also ended up being governed by the successive transfer of their property documents and failed rehabilitation projects. In each of these cases -- as well as with David's Tower -- institutional inefficiency is combined with public amnesia.
Except for those that live there, few people know what happens inside the Tower, how the inhabitants organize their daily lives, or where they cook, wash and sleep. From the outside, however, the contrast between the imposing structure and its deteriorated walls is quite apparent. Many of the windows that covered the upper floors have been broken, whilst the area that was to be used as a mezzanine has been divided up by balconies and unrendered red brick walls, drapes and zinc sheets, which are typically used in informal architecture.
Juan José Olavarría (Valencia, 1969) and Ángela Bonadies (Caracas, 1970) approach this phenomenon by deconstructing the building's visible elements and confronting them with their potential meaning in public space. They have deduced an overriding grid from the building's facade, which connects it to a vernacular modernity based on geometry and modular structures. They then explore the multiplication of this element through drawings, screen prints, altered posters and three-dimensional works in which they signal the paradoxes that have resulted from developmentalism.
Working closely with one of the main issues in his work, Olavarría deals with the relationship between image and history. On this occasion, the artist contrasts three ways of perceiving the building. Firstly, in an isometric drawing on a large-scale raw canvas, the structure becomes stands out against an empty landscape, whose surroundings have disappeared. There is nothing there, except the weightless outline of Our Lady of Caracas, which he appropriates from an anonymous painting from the end of the eighteenth century in which the Virgin is represented as the city's protector. The present-day city, like the Caracas of yesteryear, seeks the Virgin's favor in the face of destruction, whether manifested in natural disasters or through human actions.
The second means of perceiving the Tower that Olavarría deploys is a three-dimensional clay model of the building, which imitates the technique used by amateur artisans when they sculpt souvenirs of churches or village cottages to sell to tourists. This is evidently a strategy that seeks to emulate the global production and commercialization of miniature replicas of objects and monuments that are acquired by travelers to remind them of the places they have visited.
The third approach to the Tower in Olavarría's work is found in his sequence of ink drawings on paper of the Tower's orthogonal western facade. They are ordered consecutively in a series to sketch out a parable that goes from a sterile geometry to a naturalist precision. Clotheslines, bits of wood, curtains, buckets, and unfinished walls break with the formal homogeneity of the structure and challenge the precepts upon which it was built in order to create an allegory of the process of material and symbolic corrosion of the modern grid.
In Bonadies' case, the grid also breaks free and spills out onto different formats that can be easily reproduced, such as screen prints and institutional posters, which were originally created to disseminate the collection of the Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas. The superimposition of one apparently unrelated image onto another emphasizes a promiscuous reality that refuses to acknowledge the past origin of its current inefficiency. In effect, just as with David's Tower, the national museums have become dis-functional due to the mismanagement of official policies. In both cases, contingent factors prevented them from properly carrying out the original activity for which they were planned.
Bonadies confronts the drama of these events in another series of works using photographs that she appropriates and alters to present a parodic vision of the situation. In one of them, an image of the building intact is hit by lightning; in another, the rackety structure takes on a bucolic appearance as it rises from a city park, and in a third the Tower appears as a lighthouse whose foundations sink into a tiny island. In this group of works, the screen print inspired by a
japanese poster from the 1930s also stands out, in which Mr Brillembourg poses as an advertising star and invites inhabitants and passersby to take exercise going up the unfinished building's staircases.
Finally, Bonadies' ironic strategy can be summarized in a poster that is based on a public declaration signed by various Parisian intellectuals protesting against the "useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower". The piece, produced together with Miguel Murugarren, extrapolates the situation to present-day Caracas, situating David's Tower as the target of the recriminations "in the name of unappreciated Venezuelan taste".
In short, Bonadies and Olavarría's work shows a clear engagement with its context, not only in the critical recreation of anecdotal aspects and sometimes pintoresque elements the Tower, but also in their critical references to its ideological and cultural foundations. In terms of the practice of creative research, The Tower from the outside (the project's sub-title) is only a preliminary approach to a problem of greater complexity and breadth, which involves economic, political, legal and social factors. Nevertheless, the exploration of the external parts of the ill-fated building has already provided proof enough that at times we must accept that appearances are not deceptive.
