«Contemplating The Void»

In 2010, the Guggenheim Museum celebrated its 50th anniversary by opening its doors to artists and architects to respond to the Museum’s “eccentric, organic design”, and in particular to the glass rotunda, the Museum’s central space, for an exhibition entitled Contemplating the Void.

We responded to this invitation by creating gigantic, fantastical beings made of organic materials, which we christened Creatures. Breaking free from the confines of the museum, the creatures spread across the vast urban area of the North American metropolis, New York. They all intertwine in a vast array of membranes, becoming a single body that returns to the original building and occupies the edges of the void. As with the history of modern cities, these creatures take on different personalities and draw attention to neighboring sites, linking them with straight lines or curves. Observing the representativeness of these shapes and their connections reveals the organic nature of space and even the movements of human beings who live, work and/or move in the city. In any direction of the proposed model, the energy emanating returns to Guggenheim’s void. Human beings are the active subjects of this experiment, and every creature spread across the model has the force at its core. The intense irradiation then turns into a big party where music, art and conversation end, in the best way, with the meaning of all that energy.

In a utopia of tropicalization within a contemporary city, we have a bold dream: to extend the rendezvous point to other parts of the city, to go beyond the limits of the void, to go beyond the physical limits of the building and take control of the city’s immense territory. As a result, other voids spread across the urban patch, amplifying the noise and radiation of the energy originally coming from the museum’s interspaces.