Margate, United Kingdom. 2017

Art in public space

Blushing Pavilion is the result of a research project on the body, heritage, sexuality and architecture of desire in Margate. Margate was once considered the most important seaside resort on the English coast. The intervention of this 19th century pavilion on the seafront presents a selection of tangible and intangible heritage objects in a graphic documentation.

The intervention symbolises the theatricality of the power of the natural forces of wind and water. The pink curtains draw the flexible boundaries of social space while offering the possibility of sensory contemplation. Their colourful movement in the wind refers to the Victorian dresses, the fluttering skirts and the blushes of shame of the observer and the observed in that situation. 

The project was inlcuded in "New Architects 3", a publication that presents the 100 most interesting architecture studios in Great Britain.

The temporary exhibition was in the Palm Bay shelter at the eastern periphery of Cliftonville, close to the unofficial nudist area of the town, at Botany Bay.  This particular location has been chosen not just because of these architectural and anthropological issues but also because of its liminality, where those exploring the edges of public behavior - crying, screaming, loving, having pleasure, etc - have been forced by historic and current normativity out of view in public space. In the same spirit, Blushing Pavilion is an act of resistance to their being blown away.

This project is part of HOME, an ambitious programme of creative residencies and commissions in Cliftonville, Kent in 2014/15. It was selected under the Cross-border Cooperation Programme INTERREG IV A France (Channel) - England, co-funded by the ERDF and other partners including: Margate Arts Creativity Heritage, Resort, Thanet District Council and Kent County Council. European Union. Investing in your future.

More info here 

Developed in collaboration with Studio Sam Causer.

Photos: Charles Gonzalez Bernal

Installation-Performance.
Atmosphere created to play with the spectator.

This work is looking for the imperfection (a fissure), this installation is going to spaces that are left behind in the daily life, and there is where the exploration starts. Objects from the everyday life will be transformed into sounds, images, spaces and prosthesis. It is an opportunity to propose a parallel place (a fantasy) evolved amidst ordinary elements of a big city. The piece establishes an interplay of relations with the spectator exalting his presence. The objective is to build an atmosphere where the proposal is to stimulate the senses and where the author has created a space for the spectator to inhabit this new creation.

Are You Ready Made? Is more than a question, it is an expression that suggests an adversarial reference to the "ready made” wondering if we are pieces that are reused even in a work of art. It is an encounter and an experience to be lived within a work of art.

Performance. Bogota. 2013-14

Acción de Gracia is a net of images, sounds and actions that allows the spectators to create an empathic and appropriative experience by coming into contact with social practices from the immaterial heritage of Barrio Santa Fe, the red light district of Bogota. Through a sensitive connection with the life and habits of some of their neighbours, the project builds up a cartography of the local cultural and political tensions and their association with the rest of the city and country. The project, relied on a research into the deteriorated architectural goods of the zone and the plans for regenerating/cleaning the area in contrast with the value of some humanistic activities happening there, as they practice an inclusive and organic construction of collective memory of a complex city and society like Bogota and Colombia. It also designates an endangered poetical territory.

Acción de Gracia (translated as ‘Thanks-giving Action’ or ‘An Action of Grace) has as its references the Central Cemetery and the dynamics that are generated in its immediate surroundings. Acción de Gracia deepens in the figure of María Salomé, patron saint of the prostitutes, whose tomb was originally buried there and was moved to the South Cemetery, an area of low working class. The displacement of her tomb can be seen as a metaphor of the current and possibly future situation of transgender women that have been forced to live inside the boundaries of the red light district. María Salomé and the numerous versions of her legend are a sensory device that made it possible to hear the plurality of voices that juxtapose in the Santa Fe neighbourhood. This piece is an offering to trans women that were murdered for shaping a gender full of grace and a disobedient sexuality. A piece of voices woven in legends, prayers and rituals, of voices that speak for those that were silenced and outcast, of bodies that let us see a physical and metaphysical territory, and of emancipations that generate a high impact in the city´s culture.

The theatrical installation is made within a warehouse beside the cemetery (bought by the Plan Centro for the future recovery of the zone) with the support of audiovisual documents and (non-actor) performers from the community of Barrio Santa Fe and workers of the graveyard.

Text: Carlos Maria Romero
Photos: Charles Gonzalez Bernal

Installation. 2015

Set of scales with the projection of model in closed loop. When leaving the spectator discovers the object that was once projected into the room.

Materials: Sewing Staples

Photos by Ana Manosalva - Ana Maria Ruiz

Installation. 2016

Research about the concept of infinity, or what is supposed to be absolutely unconditioned or undetermined, referring to a quantity without any limit or end. This work is an approach to perpetual motion and at the same time randomness. This random is conditioned by an imposed order or a frame especially created to provide the movement. I am also interested in the creation of organisms that can demonstrate this concept due to certain faculties that can make them feign own life. One purpose of this work is to achieve an interaction between the organisms and the viewer.

Materials: Fans, festoons.

Variable dimensions

Video by Esteban Rivera

Bogota, 2014-15

Canciones para vivos y muertos is a series of installations and performances that occur between the Central Cemetery and the Center of Memory, Peace and Reconciliation in Bogota. The cemetery is located in a powerful urban area, a place of big potential for renovation and development. Paradoxically it is surrounded by the Barrio Santa Fe, red line district of Bogotá. An area known for prostitution and also for the circulation of psychoactive substances. It is a place that reflects the most political, economic and cultural conflicts and asymmetries of the country. Its inhabitants, neighbours from Santa Fe, are those who have embraced the cemetery with great affection, providing activity with a series of practices and popular rituals to ask for improve of their daily live, through the contact with death. Also they, because of the lack of a public space have converted the cemetery into the big park of the neighbourhood. This work puts into dialogue different approaches to this territory, and questions the dynamics that are seeking to give signification and solidity to this place as point of memory of the city. Through the combination of these voices this work is generating a (live) polyphony to account for the heterogeneity of discourses that draw the micro and macro stories that are woven into this place. It is a travel from the city of the living to the city of the dead, from the proper name to anonymity, from the individual to the community.

Canciones para vivos y muertos is a project developed by Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación; Escuela Taller of Bogotá; the Department of History at the National University of Colombia; Cultural Heritage Institute of Bogotá (IDPC); Red Interdisciplinar de Artes Vivas Colombia, Unidad Administrativa Especial de Servicios Públicos (UAESP) and Vividero Colectivo.

Vividero Colectivo was commissioned to realize the creation of this experience, the design and dramaturgy of the first part of the tour through the cemetery that is connected to the work of other partners.

The lighthouse from ancient times has been linked to the idea of the immobile vigilant, who gives light to the sailor and his gaze becomes. It is a silent watcher accompanying him. Refers to the security and stability that stands and resists the fury of time and nature. Its verticality is also associated with the concept of "axis-mundus", the world axis connecting the lower level to the upper.

This installation evokes the concept of lighthouse, supporting this architectural object and its meaning on a sphere.

Materials: Acrylic, steel, plastic, sand and gypsum.

Dimensions: 90x90x190cm

Installation-Performance. Bogotá 2011  

Charles Gonzalez: Spatial design and performer

Research and creation, showing in an Animal morgue of a veterinary school, inspired by Kafka's writings and the text of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Kafka Toward a Minor Literature. Tour of the spectator through three spaces that are becoming progressively more dense. The aesthetics of the place with the appearance of objects, sounds and performers get mixed.

Directed by Emilio Garcia Webi 

Charles Gonzalez: Spatial design and performer

Photos: Emilio Garcia Webi

Installation. Bogotá 2013

Is an installation built in Space Odeon for Ciudad Bosque Festival. Made in collaborations with Ana Maria Ruiz and Johana Marin, clouds talk  about   the  rain  forest, and how nature emerges from the city from an artificial environment made by humans. We chose  the  interior  garden  from  the  old building  to create an Installation, so it was visible from the first and the second floor, giving different readings in each case.

Photos: Ana Maria Ruiz