Translator: Gisela Giardino Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
“I have to trust in me,”
I’d say to myself at 18 while,
in what had been my grandfather’s butcher shop,
I modeled faces of characters in clay that would later be made of latex.
Suddenly, I’d see myself standing in front of a block of clay
which I had already ripped three or four pieces off.
“What am I doing?”, I’d ask myself.
“What led me to pull those pieces out? Those ones, and not others.
Do I really think that from here a face will come out?
I don’t know! I have to trust in me.”
So I’d put on a tape —
Yes, a tape… (Laughter)
from some movie soundtrack to forget about the subject.
And yes, after a while, when I realized, I was already in front of a face,
and it was evident that I had done it, so I stopped asking.
I think the essence of my work has to do with that,
with trusting in that part of me that lets itself be
and solves without conditioning.
It’s been a while since I left behind those latex characters,
but that part went on in me and adapted
to the different challenges coming up.
Today I design museums, shows, and immersive experiences.
Maybe, it’s because I never forgot that feeling you have
when as a child you live fantasy as a reality.
I don’t know if you can pinpoint that,
those games that plunge you in another reality,
and that other reality, that other world, you live it with all your senses.
Well, it seems that this stage hit me hard.
That’s why I think the “full circle” projects,
as my grandmother used to say when she combed my bangs,
“full circle”, surrounding you,
so they plunge you in another reality and stimulate all your senses.
But how does this process of conceiving a project come about?
How does it work?
Let’s see if I can make you feel this in your own skin.
The first thing I do in order to think a museum, or a show,
is to meet with the people who called me to do it,
to understand the theme it’s going to be about,
which, in general, I usually have no idea of beforehand.
And this is very good, because it allows me to see the theme with new eyes,
without prior conditioning.
And beyond understanding it rationally, what I’m interested in
is connecting with the people who lives it day by day, the people of the place.
And there I ask them about their experience,
their happenings, their feelings regarding this topic.
And based on their replies I start to perceive,
to shape the essence of the theme.
Or, at least, the essence that emerges from this meeting we have.
And this essence is the trigger, it’s the raw material
to start thinking the ideas.
Sometimes, in this very meeting I get a very clear image,
a whole image of the idea, and other times it’s as if a bombing of ideas
begins to take place… concepts that were dormant, asleep,
that I didn’t even know I had, they start to light up
like little candles and communicate with each other.
And something comes up, that I saw last week from the car,
and relates to a little song of my childhood, on TV,
and to a documentary I watched three years ago,
I didn’t even know I remembered,
and before reason can appear, I am already telling them an idea that,
inexplicably, it’s valid for what we are discussing.
Let’s see it with a case in point.
I was recently summoned to think
the contents of the Carnival of Humahuaca Museum,
in a building they were planning to build there.
We went to see the field with the people from there
and the people of the comparsas,
and there, I started asking them about their dreams, about their experiences,
their stories, their emotions regarding the carnival.
And they went off telling me that carnival for them
is a time for joy and liberation, when they roam the city
led by the dance, and the music, going from the streets to the houses,
where they are invited with something, and they go back to the streets,
where they keep dancing, and they go to another house,
where they are invited, and they go back to the streets,
where they keep singing, so, among streets and houses,
they lose the notion of space and time,
led by this joy.
See? There, we had an experience, a feeling to communicate, an essence.
But how do I do convey this in a museum?
How do I make someone who traveled to Humahuaca
out of carnival time, upon visiting this museum,
have at least a bite of this essence?
And thinking about this, looking at the empty space,
I thought maybe the building itself could say this,
by building it as a succession of streets and houses,
where people could get lost in a maze,
going from streets to houses, where there are contents,
to streets, where there is music, to another house with another content,
as if they were in a mini Humahuaca in permanent carnival.
And thinking of this mini Humahuaca it came to my mind
the tower of the Cabildo of Humahuaca, that has a clock
from which a saint comes out.
Maybe in our museum we could also have a tower
with a clock where a devil, the Pujllay, would come out
the devil of carnival.
And as tradition goes, the Pujllay
can only be seen in carnival times,
then our watch would mark the days of the year
until the time of the carnival, when the devil comes out.
And this allowed us to think that maybe,
someday, the people of Humahuaca could meet under the clock tower
to wait for the devil to come out and, among sirens and celebrations,
announce the beginning of the carnival,
creating a new tradition for the city.
We have to see if this happens.
It didn’t happen, I don’t know.
But the crazy thing about this is that this idea of the tower
which is so emblematic and so important for our project
and that could potentially become a new city icon
came up in a second phase, almost by chance.
Although, the truth is that nothing is so casual.
In most projects this happens:
almost at the end of the process a concept pops up
that ends up connecting everything,
and it seems incredible that it emerged so late,
because it’s so essential, so constitutive of the project
that you would say that it was the base everything was thought upon.
But no. Maybe inside our minds
ideas are distilling and keep developing
although we are not dealing with them.
And at some point they arrange themselves and they pop up.
And when you revisit the project, you think it without that connector,
you realize that it would have not been so good,
that, in fact, it would’ve been crap.
(Laughter)
And that maybe my mind was cheating on me
throughout the process making me believe I had the great thing
to allow time for this full circle sense-making idea to show up;
and as always, it appears.
Now I know that, although what I’ve done may not be super,
at some point everything is going to make sense and it will be fine.
(Applause)
Once again the phrase from my 18 years:
“I have to trust in me.”
See what happened many years ago,
when I had to think a show for the Planetarium
about Galileo Galilei for a new technology
they were about to install in the Planetarium at that time.
The challenge I had set myself was to tell the story of Galileo
but without losing the key experience of the Planetarium,
which is stargazing.
Because, maybe, the first thing that you come up with
is to create rectangular, projected screens there in the dome,
where to tell our story, with our characters and scenery,
but the last thing that I would do to a planetarium
is to turn it into a cinema with torticollis.
(Laughter)
Our goal was to make the experience of being in a planetarium
an advantage for the project,
and not an obstacle to run away from.
What we had to achieve was that Galileo’s stories
would be in the sky, but justifiably in the sky,
that they belonged to that sky we were gazing at.
And going through the history of Galileo I found the Ptolemaic armillary sphere,
which is this sphere made of rings that rotate around a center.
If we fit in these rings our city, then,
the people in the planetarium would be in the center and the whole city,
with the rings, would spin around them in the sky.
We now had our context, then we only had to adapt
the history of Galileo to that world of rings.
But, fast forward in this story,
that involved a young and adventurous Galileo,
and a bunch of zoomorphic characters
accompanying him in a kind of fable in the sky.
This that had emerged as a technical constrain of the planetarium,
began to take a much deeper dimension,
much more important.
Because the Ptolemaic armillary sphere
is really a geocentric model of the cosmos,
with the Earth in the center and everything spinning around it,
the model which was accepted in the times of Galileo
and that has a lot to do with the power of the Church.
So in our city, we would put the power in the center, the Pope.
and Galileo, feeling misunderstood and oppressed by that power,
would come out of that structure to find out of it
thinkers who would help him to see this world
from another perspective and dare to question it.
But in this story this is not an abstract concept.
This is real,
Galileo really leaves this structure.
He leaves.
And he really sees this world from another perspective,
and seeing it like that at a glance he realizes that this scaffolding,
this structure has nothing to do with how the cosmos works.
Once again the central concept of the project
popped up in a second instance.
The sad part of this story is that finally at that time
it was decided not to install the new technology in the Planetarium
and the Galileo project couldn’t be realized.
And yes, many, many times the ideas that we seed in the world
won’t be able to develop.
But many times also the process of conceiving them will leave us
very important things, very good things.
As for example in this case, this ability that Galileo had
to see the world with new eyes,
as if he was discovering it for the first time,
allows us to connect with the essential, the truth, the transcendent.
Maybe that’s why I thought about a teenage Galileo,
remembering that child that at his grandfather’s butcher shop
trusting his own essence and let it model the clay.
Today I’m trained in looking for the essence
to scape that structure
that forces upon you one point of view,
in order to find new perspectives.
And that simple change of perception
can make our entire universe expand.
(Applause)
And what is even better, maybe, just like Galileo did,
maybe we can contribute to the expansion
of other people’s universe as well.
We might only need to get our hands dirty and have trust.
(Applause)
“I have to trust in me,”
I’d say to myself at 18 while,
in what had been my grandfather’s butcher shop,
I modeled faces of characters in clay that would later be made of latex.
Suddenly, I’d see myself standing in front of a block of clay
which I had already ripped three or four pieces off.
“What am I doing?”, I’d ask myself.
“What led me to pull those pieces out? Those ones, and not others.
Do I really think that from here a face will come out?
I don’t know! I have to trust in me.”
So I’d put on a tape —
Yes, a tape… (Laughter)
from some movie soundtrack to forget about the subject.
And yes, after a while, when I realized, I was already in front of a face,
and it was evident that I had done it, so I stopped asking.
I think the essence of my work has to do with that,
with trusting in that part of me that lets itself be
and solves without conditioning.
It’s been a while since I left behind those latex characters,
but that part went on in me and adapted
to the different challenges coming up.
Today I design museums, shows, and immersive experiences.
Maybe, it’s because I never forgot that feeling you have
when as a child you live fantasy as a reality.
I don’t know if you can pinpoint that,
those games that plunge you in another reality,
and that other reality, that other world, you live it with all your senses.
Well, it seems that this stage hit me hard.
That’s why I think the “full circle” projects,
as my grandmother used to say when she combed my bangs,
“full circle”, surrounding you,
so they plunge you in another reality and stimulate all your senses.
But how does this process of conceiving a project come about?
How does it work?
Let’s see if I can make you feel this in your own skin.
The first thing I do in order to think a museum, or a show,
is to meet with the people who called me to do it,
to understand the theme it’s going to be about,
which, in general, I usually have no idea of beforehand.
And this is very good, because it allows me to see the theme with new eyes,
without prior conditioning.
And beyond understanding it rationally, what I’m interested in
is connecting with the people who lives it day by day, the people of the place.
And there I ask them about their experience,
their happenings, their feelings regarding this topic.
And based on their replies I start to perceive,
to shape the essence of the theme.
Or, at least, the essence that emerges from this meeting we have.
And this essence is the trigger, it’s the raw material
to start thinking the ideas.
Sometimes, in this very meeting I get a very clear image,
a whole image of the idea, and other times it’s as if a bombing of ideas
begins to take place… concepts that were dormant, asleep,
that I didn’t even know I had, they start to light up
like little candles and communicate with each other.
And something comes up, that I saw last week from the car,
and relates to a little song of my childhood, on TV,
and to a documentary I watched three years ago,
I didn’t even know I remembered,
and before reason can appear, I am already telling them an idea that,
inexplicably, it’s valid for what we are discussing.
Let’s see it with a case in point.
I was recently summoned to think
the contents of the Carnival of Humahuaca Museum,
in a building they were planning to build there.
We went to see the field with the people from there
and the people of the comparsas,
and there, I started asking them about their dreams, about their experiences,
their stories, their emotions regarding the carnival.
And they went off telling me that carnival for them
is a time for joy and liberation, when they roam the city
led by the dance, and the music, going from the streets to the houses,
where they are invited with something, and they go back to the streets,
where they keep dancing, and they go to another house,
where they are invited, and they go back to the streets,
where they keep singing, so, among streets and houses,
they lose the notion of space and time,
led by this joy.
See? There, we had an experience, a feeling to communicate, an essence.
But how do I do convey this in a museum?
How do I make someone who traveled to Humahuaca
out of carnival time, upon visiting this museum,
have at least a bite of this essence?
And thinking about this, looking at the empty space,
I thought maybe the building itself could say this,
by building it as a succession of streets and houses,
where people could get lost in a maze,
going from streets to houses, where there are contents,
to streets, where there is music, to another house with another content,
as if they were in a mini Humahuaca in permanent carnival.
And thinking of this mini Humahuaca it came to my mind
the tower of the Cabildo of Humahuaca, that has a clock
from which a saint comes out.
Maybe in our museum we could also have a tower
with a clock where a devil, the Pujllay, would come out
the devil of carnival.
And as tradition goes, the Pujllay
can only be seen in carnival times,
then our watch would mark the days of the year
until the time of the carnival, when the devil comes out.
And this allowed us to think that maybe,
someday, the people of Humahuaca could meet under the clock tower
to wait for the devil to come out and, among sirens and celebrations,
announce the beginning of the carnival,
creating a new tradition for the city.
We have to see if this happens.
It didn’t happen, I don’t know.
But the crazy thing about this is that this idea of the tower
which is so emblematic and so important for our project
and that could potentially become a new city icon
came up in a second phase, almost by chance.
Although, the truth is that nothing is so casual.
In most projects this happens:
almost at the end of the process a concept pops up
that ends up connecting everything,
and it seems incredible that it emerged so late,
because it’s so essential, so constitutive of the project
that you would say that it was the base everything was thought upon.
But no. Maybe inside our minds
ideas are distilling and keep developing
although we are not dealing with them.
And at some point they arrange themselves and they pop up.
And when you revisit the project, you think it without that connector,
you realize that it would have not been so good,
that, in fact, it would’ve been crap.
(Laughter)
And that maybe my mind was cheating on me
throughout the process making me believe I had the great thing
to allow time for this full circle sense-making idea to show up;
and as always, it appears.
Now I know that, although what I’ve done may not be super,
at some point everything is going to make sense and it will be fine.
(Applause)
Once again the phrase from my 18 years:
“I have to trust in me.”
See what happened many years ago,
when I had to think a show for the Planetarium
about Galileo Galilei for a new technology
they were about to install in the Planetarium at that time.
The challenge I had set myself was to tell the story of Galileo
but without losing the key experience of the Planetarium,
which is stargazing.
Because, maybe, the first thing that you come up with
is to create rectangular, projected screens there in the dome,
where to tell our story, with our characters and scenery,
but the last thing that I would do to a planetarium
is to turn it into a cinema with torticollis.
(Laughter)
Our goal was to make the experience of being in a planetarium
an advantage for the project,
and not an obstacle to run away from.
What we had to achieve was that Galileo’s stories
would be in the sky, but justifiably in the sky,
that they belonged to that sky we were gazing at.
And going through the history of Galileo I found the Ptolemaic armillary sphere,
which is this sphere made of rings that rotate around a center.
If we fit in these rings our city, then,
the people in the planetarium would be in the center and the whole city,
with the rings, would spin around them in the sky.
We now had our context, then we only had to adapt
the history of Galileo to that world of rings.
But, fast forward in this story,
that involved a young and adventurous Galileo,
and a bunch of zoomorphic characters
accompanying him in a kind of fable in the sky.
This that had emerged as a technical constrain of the planetarium,
began to take a much deeper dimension,
much more important.
Because the Ptolemaic armillary sphere
is really a geocentric model of the cosmos,
with the Earth in the center and everything spinning around it,
the model which was accepted in the times of Galileo
and that has a lot to do with the power of the Church.
So in our city, we would put the power in the center, the Pope.
and Galileo, feeling misunderstood and oppressed by that power,
would come out of that structure to find out of it
thinkers who would help him to see this world
from another perspective and dare to question it.
But in this story this is not an abstract concept.
This is real,
Galileo really leaves this structure.
He leaves.
And he really sees this world from another perspective,
and seeing it like that at a glance he realizes that this scaffolding,
this structure has nothing to do with how the cosmos works.
Once again the central concept of the project
popped up in a second instance.
The sad part of this story is that finally at that time
it was decided not to install the new technology in the Planetarium
and the Galileo project couldn’t be realized.
And yes, many, many times the ideas that we seed in the world
won’t be able to develop.
But many times also the process of conceiving them will leave us
very important things, very good things.
As for example in this case, this ability that Galileo had
to see the world with new eyes,
as if he was discovering it for the first time,
allows us to connect with the essential, the truth, the transcendent.
Maybe that’s why I thought about a teenage Galileo,
remembering that child that at his grandfather’s butcher shop
trusting his own essence and let it model the clay.
Today I’m trained in looking for the essence
to scape that structure
that forces upon you one point of view,
in order to find new perspectives.
And that simple change of perception
can make our entire universe expand.
(Applause)
And what is even better, maybe, just like Galileo did,
maybe we can contribute to the expansion
of other people’s universe as well.
We might only need to get our hands dirty and have trust.
(Applause)
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