The exhibition titled “Le Corbusier and South America”, in the main hall of the Contemporary Art Museum in Santiago (Chile), shows for the first time in Chile a collection of Le Corbusier’s original plans and drawings for 12 projects he created in South America (although, of all of those, only the Curutchet house in Argentina was actually built).

As part of the exhibition, Chilean curator Maximiano Atria has arranged all around the central part of the hall location-specific installations by a number of artists. And I’m proud to be one of them.

My piece,”Restricted Realities”, is a 25x45x65cm installation, created with hand cut polychromatic geometric wood pieces.

Obviously it started as an homage to Le Corbusier, but I wanted to go beyond his obvious legacy of form and shape, of approach and history, to explore the man behind the legend.

Le Corbusier did not receive a formal regulated architectural education, yet, after some art school and several years working in architects’ studios, he ended up not only having his own studio, but also teaching and inspiring architects worldwide. As the father of XX century architecture, he was a lot more interested in the concept of a building, of a space, than about the formal aspects of it.

In ”Restricted Realities” I built the model for a space design to both host and reflect the mind. It’s a house for the mind. But not just one mind, as that house can be inhabited by several, or even all, minds. What naturally stems from it is a structure that has both impossible angles and open spaces, restricted areas and open areas. Even the colors seem to struggle to work together.

It’s a solid and stable structure that permeates with tension from every angle. Just like it happens when we try to accommodate more than one mind in a single shared experience. As a matter of fact, it often happens within a single mind.

So they are ‘realities’, but they are ‘restricted’. And it is in that ‘restriction’ that they are constructed as realities. The walls are norms, agreements, arrangements, expectations, and any other result of interaction. The colors on the walls are culture, expression, language, art itself and any other communication of the aforementioned interactions.

With those two simple elements, the interactions between individuals and groups, and their communication, we construct our realities, realities that we try to inhabit, to conform, and to share. But that construction is subjective, and that subjectivity is what gives rise to tensions, idealized here as angles.

As a last and subtle detail, I added a floor platform to only part of the whole structure. Because we need an inclusive world, an inclusive view. Not all individuals, not all realities, are the same, have the same ground and basis, enjoy or suffer the same constraints and circumstances. And that’s the first level to be taken into account, to be built.

Build baby, build your reality.