On the occassion of the "Bienal Iberoamericána", in Medellín, about a year and a half ago, I attended the presentation of a professor that had proposed a particular exercise to his students: the design of a luxury hotel in a "favelas" (shanty town). Understandably, part of the attendants saw in the proposal not a formal or academic rethoric, but a lack of judgement and knowledge of reality on behalf of the professor. A reality that scores alarming rates of marginalization, poverty and social exclusion.
The critique made by the participants of the congress "Ciudad Abierta. Medellin" was aimed at this vision created by the Western or North society, a paternalistic, uninformed and excessively rethoric point of view. Their allegedly architectural narratives are more and more detached from reality, and indiscriminately offend those who work every day to improve the conditions of these urban areas.
Not long ago, a master in architecture repeated the experiment, proposing the reconstruction of a slum by the students in the university courtyard. The result was a caricature slum, a scenery that presented a grotesque and tragic image.
The image of the slum, favela or depressed area is used in a thousand projects masked as architectural rags, to the interior of which not even the common middle class would have access, given their luxurious finishing.
It is not only a formal or stylistic matter: we can see the same absurdity in the narratives of "soft" social disobedience politics, also uninformed and reality-distorting, that aim to make the protest enough digestible for the comfortable middle-class architects of the Western world. The protests in Turkey and London two years ago (not to mention the ever-present 15M and the Arab Spring) are situations of opression and social explosion, with a problematic that is serious and profound enough not to trivialize about it.
So, as we were saying before, the fact that the last and most controvert manipulation these days consists on the realization of a rest area at the fair "Art Basel" that simulates a slum in one of the richest cities in Europe and the world, is just irritating. It is not clear wether this obeys to the lure of gain of the fair's promoters or to a true will of giving opportunities to young artists and architects (sometimes not so young). Meanwhile, truth is stranger than fiction, and the interior of a nearby building is all about glamour and wealth, ready for the works of art to be sold by millions of euros.
Comparisons are always odious, but I can't help to remember the Venice Biennale 2010, where the intervention of a group of architects from Switzerland and the Kingdom of Bahrain received the Golden Lion prize to the best national participation. An intervention to remember: intelligent and the product of a deep and extensive research project. Just the opposite to this year's unfortunate "Favela Café" in Art Basel, an intervention that aims to ease our conscience and mask the lack of social commitment.
