ARCHITECTURE(s) of BEING

Representation does not and cannot exist without a predetermined space, without a territory in which to locate –frame– the discursive reason of all narratio, while at once accepting the validity of the idea that, in the practice of contemporary art, any narration inherently bears the seed of its own inoperatvity, or in other words, of its, in equal measure, natural and productive failure. Put another way, there is no representation without an architecture, albeit minimal or virtually inexistent, where to locate, following in the wake of Heidegger’s claim that the house is the home of the Being, the physical space playing host to the ceremony of an ontology of passions, of a narration of the vital and the insignificant, of the necessary and the disposable. And of course, we have deliberately sidestepped any reference to the idea of gender, of who it is that actually inhabits the house of Being. There is no architecture of gender.

For some years Begoña Montalbán’s work in the photographic format, in its widest, all-embracing meaning, has been passionately (this too a deliberate choice of adjective) addressing the possibilities of how to structure a genderless architecture (or, divested of the physical and morphological variations of sexual difference, though conceding the obvious visible reality in her works dealing with women) in which to situate, or construct an impossible model, of an architecture of the Being (in feminine), and without this implying an abandonment in the face of the masculine normativity of phallocentric representation and its gaze, of the verticality of an architecture that refuses to rescind its biological origins. Hence the (democratic?) horizontality of actions that, above and beyond the obsessive and multiplying presence of one single prototype of woman, are actually reminding us of the fiction of all predetermined thinking, of all falsely agreed truth, that genders do not exist, only the desire of the Being. The (architectural) construction of our own and desired gender. Or perhaps, the cultural construction of our own architecture as thinking and passionate subjects.

Luis Francisco Pérez