Vitoria-Gasteiz: From the ideas of urban theorists such as Mike Davis or Edward Soja, according to which Los Angeles itself contains the amalgam of large contemporary cities, the artist Aitor Lajarin has created the fiction, PostCity.
Sponsored by Alava’s Autonomous Delegation, Vitoria-Gasteiz City Hall and Tubacex, ARTIUM. The Basque Contemporary Art Center-Museum will showcase the exhibition From Here to Everywhere. Profiling Postcity up to January 30.
It’s a display in which the artist analyzes the life and space of cities according to the processes of urbanization and restructuration all over the world in recent decades. Postcity is the fiction city where Lajarin puts together the features seen in the new urbanism.
The exhibition has been accompanied by debates on new city models, with the participation of famous city planner Jordi Borja and writer Carlos Taibo, among others.
The post-city profile comes from the experience gathered by Aitor Lajarin over two years in Los Angeles, where he was due to an ARTIUM scholarship. Lajarin manifested the relation among urbanization processes, transformations and the new social, cultural and economic conflicts and, on the other hand, concepts such as neoliberalism, globalization and post-modernity.
Profiling Postcityintroduces this imaginary city with two central pieces, an animation with the same title and an installation where Aitor Lajarin has used objects created to film the movie. In the video, Lajarin presents, like in a documentary, the city’s character and its elements: different neighborhoods, buildings, urban and communication plots, vehicles, industrial zones, trade centers, people, the brighter and darker parts of any city. Along with this animation, another one titled Postcity Commercial alternatively offers, just like advertising add made by any institution, the most attractive image of the city.
Postcity Geographyis the installation made by Lajarin with the objects he created for the animation videos. Over a squared dais, is it’s the grid of a scaled map, the artist has created a kind of Postcity skyline with advertising posters, vehicles, road systems, buildings... Its shadow is projected on the wall so the profile of the city remains well-defined for spectators. Out of that skyline, Lajarin has placed a sculpture representing a skyscraper, maybe the highest in the world, icon of every contemporary city.
Around these works, Aitor Lajarin has sited videos, collages, paintings in different dimensions and sculptures; some of which go deep into the idea of urban plot or skyline. One sculpture located at the starting point of the exhibition represents an imperfectly spherical world map where the urban plot (through fragments of air pictures taken in cities) has invaded sea and land. In a small painting, a woman holds in her stretched out hand the same world ball. Different animations allude to the same idea of growing urbanization of the planet.
The Rubik cube, as symbol of complexity of modern cities, is present in different works, in the main video as well as in the central installation and it plays the leading role in the final stage of the exhibition: one impossible-to-solve cube as the colored surfaces have been replaced by fragments of air pictures taken over cities. Overall, Lajarin’s view of the megacity phenomenon is a polyhedronical one, not necessarily negative, but it can have multiple readings, from pessimists to optimists.
ARTIUM. Basque Center-Museum of Contemporary Art
France 24, 01002 Vitoria-Gasteiz
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