Pedro & Juana

Since their introduction to museums in the 19th century, dioramas have constituted a museographic device for displaying spaces to scale, where remote places, geographically or dislocated in time, are reflected. A mixture of art and science, dioramas became the first attempt at virtual reality, through the interrelation between a foreground and a painting in a curved background. Thus the diorama represented a natural space that was transformed into a landscape through its own constructive morphology.
For this project, the Mexican studio Pedro&Juana works with the device of diorama as a radical architectural gesture: a "window into the city" that reproduces a visual reality from an exercise in taxidermy, framing what by inertia is always in constant change. Through this intervention, Pedro & Juana makes an open question on the relationship between culture and nature, representation and reality, and the "power" of the subject and its capacity to contain, compose and fragment inside a vitrine the constructed world.