Saludarte Foundation 2014 _Curatorial Program presents Uprooting Architecture (Constructing non-places)_ in Miami

The exhibit series include tree “episodes”, each one with one internationally renowned artist: Episode #1 April, 22 with Juan Fernando Herrán; Episode #2 May, 30, with Marcius Galan, and Episode #3 Nov, 28, with Carlos Garaicoa.

The curatorial program is based on Francis Bedford’s (1816-1894) photography and his architectural and topographic analysis upon an openly imperial and dominant English society that is presented in an impulsive and optimistic mid-nineteenth century.

Today, in the absence of any dominant narrative, celebrating the 120 years of his passing, the analytical exercise on an infralight architecture and subversive criticism is presented by Marcius Galan (Brazil), Carlos Garaicoa (Cuba), and Juan F. Herrán (Colombia) who exhibit, for their first time as solo projects in Miami, the points of depression of an autistic modernity that gets confronted with consequences of inhabitancy and instability.

The 120 years of the death of Bedford is also the celebration of the end of a playful image, that is architecturally and socially proud-hearted, and that seems to have led to a self-absorbed circular non-place difficult to escape from. Miami presents the crucial stage for a visual cross-conversation that allows us to deepen both into the first progressive capitalist references, and the late current depressive ones. This uprooting architecture necessarily refers to an informed apparatus of its utopian and delocalizing image.

As the city grows through the architectural commissions at Herzog & Meuron, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid or Rem Koolhaas, the urban landscape of Miami describes a deficit of contextual reflection preventing a critical analysis of its rapidly changing topography.

Uprooting Architecture is so, and ultimately, a reading exercise of the city itself, an analytical parenthesis to evaluate Miami’s performing complex biography and modernity.