LIGA 14

The binational practice MAPA employs a strategy to make the gallery space itself present and tangible by means of lattice of wooden posts. Recalling a hypostyle hall, this distribution of contiguous elements creates an intensified experience of the space, generating orthogonal and diagonal views through the obstacles. Each of these vertical columns has also been cut into and houses a scale model of a scene from everyday life. This assembly of small spaces within the space presents architecture as a discipline in which material and life come together. The visitor’s exploration activates the space, creating personal encounters between the individual and the activities represented, as well as a fragmented reading of the visitor in the space—a recurring strategy in MAPA’s work. Taken as a whole, the multiple everyday scenes and the mathematical repetition of the wooden posts generate a symbiosis between life and material, between individual scenes and the collective formed by the polis, and between the particular and the general. As a result, it is an exhibition that intelligently fluctuates between architectural representation and phenomenological experience.