Mariela Limerutti Visual Artist, Argentina.


LIVE ENGRAVINGS
Stavanger, Norway.
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LIVE ENGRAVINGS

This project was selected in a public competition for the public art event that took place in the city of Stavanger, Norway. On the occasion it was declared "Culture European City 2008". This project was chosen with other seven projects, to be developed along the Pedersgata street, which joins the downtown with the coast. It proposed to capture a part of the architecture of this site through a displacement to the drawing and a change of scale. The plan was to interfere in the reality with a fantasy language. The work made itself place in the paths of this street in the city. Simplified linear silhouettes of the facade of certain architectural constructions were engraved in front of their entrances.

The relation with the practice in Asian cultures of drawing, every day, an ornamental form on the threshold of people´s houses to protect them, would load these drawings with certain sacred aura.

Due to the strong influence of the European literature for children in our Latin-American idiosyncrasy, those medieval houses in Stavanger belong to our well known popular stories. That architecture, many of the uses of public spaces, its distribution and nature, are recognizable for our collective imaginary. The intention was to make this subtle step between the reality of a city and the idea of it that we have from another side of the earth, visible, and palpable, making imagination develop incredibly.

The perdurability that the technique used here gives to the work refers to the future of those buildings, which are in high risk of disappearance. Modern architecture and malls are displacing those constructions, most of them dating from the year 1650. Twenty interventions were realized in front of the most representative houses of this situation.