Anatomic Work

Mix Media: Computer Render,Photography,Oil paint on x-ray July 2006,  Lennox Contemporary Gallery

Fascination with the human body, with God supreme creation, has always been part of Art and ergo of science, since dissection has been the most common method of anatomic study and learning.
Although much is written about difficulties of artist in obtaining cadavers for dissection- with some local exceptions- it was an accepted practice by both, religious and civil authorities, for the purpose of legal and scientific investigation. In fact in De Sepultis (a 1301 papal bull) Boniface VIII instructs the boiling of flesh and bones of the  Crusaders for easy  transportation, allows their dissection, prohibiting only the dispersal of parts (for easy reassembly in the Day of Judgement).

The first publications appeared in the XVII century in spite of numerous anatomical studies done by Da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Rosso Fiorentino, and others. Their link to art was due not only because of their use to design, painting and sculpting but also because it was through the hands of the illustrator that the anatomist could communicate its findings and avoid the natural feeling of revulsion and pain provoked by the image of dead matter. 

In other words, the role of the illustrator was to transform the macabre, dismembered and decomposed biological matter into a pleasing and coherent image that could be used by scientist as well as artist. Or this reason De Humanis Corporis Fabrica and Epitome of Andrea Vesalius, was one of the most influential and copied publications of the XVII century.

By the XVIII century the roles of anatomist, illustrator and print maker were ambiguous.

This interdisciplinary collaboration proved to be an essential in the development of both science and art.

Historically the relation between Architecture and Art has been very tight, and even with science, particularly in areas related with the knowledge of the human body. 

Nevertheless, afterward with the discovery of X-rays and other non-invasive exploratory techniques such as MRI, CATscan, etc the connection between Art and Science weakened or was rendered un-necessary.

In the contemporary world both, the production of meaningful spaces and the close relationship that once existed with Art and Science has been weakened by a tendency to neglect or numb our senses, and by given priorities  merely to the functional aspect of the architectural profession, reducing it to mundane 'construction'.

As an architect that has worked in Art and has been constantly exposed to medical science since infancy (both my parents are doctors: neurology and surgery), my work has been looking to re-establish this connection by using also modern techniques of artistic representation and scientific exploration; thematically, playing with dualities such as: natural and constructed landscapes, the rational and the imaginary, and the perception of scale, etc.

Petri Dish + Clams + Translucent Images + Light + Base

w/Gaston Soucy,Dr.Plaido Mora &Dr. Rut Mora Izturriaga

For MEASURE (art party) We worked  with the formal repetition of natural and man made patterns, using images from cities, landscapes and human body parts (particularly brain cells) calling the attention  on the outstanding formal resemblance and the dramatic scale differences.
The piece resulted in an illuminated object that by using Petri Dishes and translucent images referred to a microscopic sense of scale. Playing with this assumption, the sense of scale was broken or displaced when the content was, on the contrary macro-scale image such as an aerial picture of  cities, landscapes, etc.
Comparative statistics were place at the base

X-PORTRAIT Skull #1: x-ray + oil + wood + plastic + light

Illness makes us much more conscious of our body, its functions, its power and limitations. The pain, the anxiety, the uncertainty created by it produces an immediate awareness of fragility and puts in perspective what we many times overlook.
On 2008, after going for a minor surgical head intervention, a friend –the patient-handed me two x-rays of his head (side and front) and asked me to do an ‘X- Portrait’.
Since we have worked together in the past with cities, wounds, and body parts I created two images that reflected these experiences; playing between hard and soft geometries, rational and organic shapes, natural and constructed landscapes.

Horizon Variations

(after Max Richter)

Summer 2010-Mary Kim & Ruth Mora, poem with 2 hands

In the thick of the night, the white rabbit licks

in the moon he is just a shadow

in the wild tobacco, aromatic, shy,opens up

while we look outside to our land

Overgrown with last winter's languor

is the hope of finding something new

in spring's shadows

a smile is brighter than the sun

birds flock in your eyes

when the blue shadows are turning black

the remnants of yesterday's dream conspire

to make me happy again

Palimpsests of History.

The Romans used to write in wax-coated tables. Referred as ‘palimpsest’ (Greek παλιν (palin): "again" + ψαω (psao): "I scrape”) these tables where written, scraped, cleaned and used again. As a result of this technique, some Palimpsests contain the traces of hundreds of texts written in them.

Cities are palimpsests of memories, collecting the records of innumerable lives and events built over time. Like poems where each word carries multiple meanings, cities contain the complex history of events past: victory, invasion, imperialist domination, communist regime, rise of an empire, decadence, evangelization, bombing…the fragility of civilization is written, scraped and re-written in their walls, monuments, structures… and through this density, meaning is captured. 

“Each particular manifestation on a building is just one moment in a long history of possible forms it might take”.Phelan,Peggy Building the life drive:architecture and repetition on Herzog & DeMeuron: Natural History,1999

 

Wars, battles, redevelopment, natural disasters, act as the voluntary or involuntarily ‘erasers‘ of the palimpsest. Bombings, for example, can flatten entire areas of a particular city or create regular patterns of destruction where only a keen eye can read and recognize the signs, marks, and traces left behind.

Walking on the streets of London, in a residential neighborhood, I noticed that once every so often a new house was inserted into the traditional urban pattern of old row houses; this seemed quite natural until I realized that the insertions occurred rhythmically and precisely every ten houses. I started wondering why and discovered, with some discomfort, that these new houses are scabs, new tissue that had healed over the wounds inflicted by an aerial bombing attack during the Second World War. 

‘War levels the cities in much more than the physical sense; it reduces its multilayered complexity of meaning to one-layered tableaux…’.Wood, Lebbeus. Architecture & War. Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.

Beyond the limits of its intricate physical reality, the city fragments become reference points, symbols that define the identity of the place and give it its character but also, and most importantly, create a symbolic link with the inhabitants, the citizens of the place. It is this symbolic connection what evokes a feeling of belonging, of ownership, of understanding that corresponds to our vision of what is real and as such represents the city itself.

Winston Churchill must have felt and understood this connection during the Second World War when he gave the order to keep St Paul's Cathedral standing during the London Blitz. He realized that the structure, whose silhouette dominated London’s Skyline at the time, symbolically represented London itself and through it the spirit and pride of Britain.

Surveillance crews were on 24 hour watch to put off any fire that occurred around its premises and, although severely damaged, St Paul's Cathedral, survived the German bombings. While the whole city was covered in rubble and dust, St. Paul’s dome could be seen from the distance standing beyond the smoke, and every Londoner knew that in spite of all the damage ‘the city’ was still standing.

War is a cultural entity, a universal phenomenon whose form and scope varies but never the less repeats. The problem of destructiveness has been a constant element along human history as if it was just an unavoidable component of human nature.

‘Death Instinct’ was described by Sigmund Freud, in 1920, as a compulsion, a ‘compelling aspiration’, a need (conscious or unconscious) leading towards death, destruction and forgetfulness. Destructiveness,  he explains,   is the product of the constant human struggle between two opposites: Eros and Thanatos: The former looking for creativity, harmony, sexual connection, self preservation…life; the latter looking for aggression, repetition, disruption, self-destruction…death. He discovered that the ‘compulsive repetition’ of certain patterns of human behavior was, in a way, inevitable.

Although the instinctive nature of this concept is questionable, its repetitiveness can be taken for certain as human history can be described by an infinite cycle of destruction and renewal.

As human nature struggles to find a balance between life and death, inevitably, cities will be destroyed and rebuilt, scars and scabs will appear and the question of reconstruction will always be faced by the double necessity of remembering and the struggle to forget; governments will be replaced, boundaries will move, countries will change names…but the cities will remain there as the true palimpsests of history.

This article was first published in :On Site-War and Architecture-July 2009