This installation is the first phase of my system. Theory of Transition starts from Frederick Kiesler's Endless House: an architecture whose form arises from the proportions of the body and its needs. Among these needs, I start from the need to replay a memory: the body needs to return to a place in order to memorise it. The method studies how the memory of a place is stored in the body and then transformed into a habitable structure. 

Between 2013 and 2018, I observed the cycles of destruction and reconstruction of 120 houses in Monterrey, my hometown: what happens to a house when it is left uninhabited, demolished, and sometimes replaced by another on the same plot. The method comprises three phases, presented here as three works. 

Destruction. Over 48 months, I photographed and filmed each house and collected the soil of its plot. The video overlays all the filmed visits to the same site in transparency, so that each visit remains visible at the same time as the others. 

Habitation. I occupy the destroyed houses through an anthropometric survey. I walk each plot, following the traces of the abandoned construction, until my body memorises it. I then draw its plan and elevations from memory, using my body as the unit of measurement. 

Reconstruction. From these drawings, I build, away from the original site, a habitable space at the proportions of my body: a structure of steel wire and mud, made from the soil of the plots mixed with water. 

The process is recursive. Each reconstruction in turn becomes a memory, which is inhabited and reconstructed again, and each return produces a different form. 

Theory of Transition establishes the elements of all my work: the memory of a place, the measure of the body, and reconstruction. In Fifth of September (2019), the material begins to transform during the exhibition.

Theory of Transition, 2018

Installation: video, drawing: drywall and graphite, steel, site soil, water

Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil