Paper short abstract:

How could the construction process of a videoart center mediate through local communities and global trends? How could a methacrylate bird cage represent local communities, contemporary art, derelict memories and the paradoxes of political ecology?

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the role of representation in the material transformations conducted to convert two derelict low-income houses located in a small Mediterranean village, Blanca, into a contemporary videoart museum. The aim of the project was to give life to a new museum, seen as an activity detached from Blanca's daily routines, but also, the arrival of video art in Blanca must be understood as an opportunity to alter, through the use of technologies, the meanings of popular dwellings, contemporary art, local communities and domesticities.

The intervention consists of small gestures that overlap with the existing atmosphere, activating a desirable complicity between the visitor, the building and the works of video art. The small material changes result from adapting the new program to generate ambiguity and to destabilize the predictable. Colours, cracks, odours, damage, facilities... all are possibilities that act in a positive and affirmative way. We tried to think of seduction as a break in the foreseeable logic to generate attraction, complicity and acceptance. Thus we displayed methacrylate artifacts produced by digital manufacturing and assembled on IKEA structures, electrical wires mounted on fluorescent insulators, fluorescent tattoos painted on walls and ceilings that extend the configuration of existing flooring, 'esparto' furniture produced by the 'esparto' women workers, etc. As a result, the works of art are inserted in spaces mediated by technologies that refer the viewer to complex sensitive experiences, where the combination of parody, memory, play and sound pushes the user to the limits of clear understanding of works of art.