¿ Lo normal, será eso lo anormal ? (detail) 1999. Fabric and steel cables. 25 x 55 m.
Monique Bastiaans has given a tour of the facade of the Cultural Center of Almussafes.
The intervention, crowned with the phrase "the normal... could that be the abnormal?", shows the doors and windows of the building's main facade covered by domestic and typical curtains, provoking a quick association of ideas: the exterior becomes its opposite. The outside space symbolically becomes the interior of events that, however, occur to others outside. This idea is reinforced by the presence of a disordered accumulation of blue footprints stamped on the floor, steps, and entrance of the building, as if the comings and goings of the interior had been forever marked in this new, now public, space.
Álvaro de los Angeles, El Levante (Postscript) 2 – 7 – 1999
The public sphere is full of no one because what characterizes the modern city is the guaranteed anonymity of its inhabitants, something that greatly helps us go unnoticed, but which confronts us with a solitude in the commonplace that is impossible to interrupt within the rationalist grid that supports this anonymous city that all our cities have become, lacking that warmth of proximity because the straight lines on which they rise are as cold as ice and allow no one to remain. Institutional buildings, unlike our homes, come nightfall, they shut down, and they sleep with a latency that seems dead and the end of things, all because the lights go out without anyone staying to watch television, read, or dine, without arguing or anything. So giving them life is more complicated than it seems. Because in institutional buildings, as in public spaces and places, no one lives; only people pass by, on their way home. People's footsteps in public places go unnoticed because they leave no trace on the asphalt of the streets or the office tiles, which are cleaned and polished daily. They leave no trace because what belongs to everyone becomes as impersonal as it is inhuman; only life gives warmth to things, the home that makes a place your home. So the question becomes, no one lives there, nothing inhabits it, not even in the buildings. Why is the public space so inhospitable?
One of the characteristics that has always struck me about public places is the haste with which those in power clean them up, leaving no trace and depersonalizing the space and cooling it off. After every popular festival, a cleaning brigade emerges, restoring the festive and human element to the purely bureaucratic procession.
I believe that in this intervention, in a way, there is a reaction against the absence of our traces and the warmth of the shared territory, its accelerated hygiene, which provides nothing more than a clinical horizon of absence that compels us to pass without remaining. Achieving that public spaces, or institutional buildings, cease to be places of passage and become living rooms: the key here is to bring life back to the place that regulates and legislates it to the point of almost impeding it.
We can trace this interest by following the traces left behind in places of transit, the plaza, the access points to the institutional building, and its interior staircases. This representation of the signs of having passed through attempts to demonstrate human presence in a place that doesn't allow even a hint of it. With the reversal of roles, we find another attempt at humanization, like when we turn out our pockets and want to demonstrate the truth of our words. Now we turn around the institutional building and submit it to the surveillance of people who only hurry past; with the net curtains in place, the drapes as they should be, and the exterior light streaming through the windows onto the street, the exterior space (with multiple interpretations and uses) is transformed into the home of the institution's legitimate owner, the same people who hurry past its facade, not daring to linger, just to see if they can, now that we have the living room clean and there's a radiant morning that invites you to look in and look around, to keep an eye on the one who watches over you and put him in his place, at your service. Thus, with the institution subject to the house, perhaps we can introduce enough warmth to illuminate the life that is lacking, and never present, in institutional buildings or public places; because we are so visible in them that we only want to run past and avoid the gaze of this order that is stationed in every square and at every step.
This reversal of roles, which turns the building upside down and faces inward so we can see it clearly from our homes, reflects the interest in defusing the cold in places and spaces that bureaucracy has rendered inhospitable.
Nilo Casares 1999