Uncertainty – Salon2060 – BE
‘Uncertainty’
Juan Duque makes site-specific installations. He re-activates memories through interactions with places and explorations of its surfaces. Putting together tangible materials and leaving room to poetic abstraction, Juan Duque brings back textures and images of landscapes he lived through.
With the eyes of an architect, he develops his ideas on in-situ works where the specific characteristics of a selected site are the starting point; they can be floor patterns and prints, grids, marks, cracks in the walls, spatial angles, light conditions…
In 2009, he did an art residency of two months at De Stichting id11 Delft (The Netherlands), an institution that had created for one year an international art residence program placed at Poptahof neighbourhood, located in a community housing blocks outside the city of Delft. Due to urban gentrification the housing blocks were going to be demolished and the former community, mostly immigrants, re-located. Every time a flat was empty, Id11 called an artist to live and work with the community. Juan Duque created five in-situ installations with the following text as introduction:
A space…
How to approach it, making it your own…
When entering into 636 flat at Poptahof – Delft for the first time brought about these questions:
“How many times the doors have been opened and closed?”
“Under which circumstances in their inhabitants’ daily lives?”
Many people came to live in those spaces, many people left leaving traces.
I came as stranger, I observed, I imagined, I also had stories to tell…
I took the space as hostage, and worked there to render homage to those memories
Re-appropriation is a territorial struggle…
Working with materials found in the 636 flat – wooden doors, frames, curtains, carpets, newspapers, I constructed in-situ installations that alter the space.
Yet, bit by bit some things start taking place, having a shape, making sense…
Small Kitchen
A room with a carpet
A room with forgotten curtains
A large seating room with a great view to the horizon…
5 small chapels…
Visitors come to make evident the cracks in the surface of the status quo.
Intruders Welcome to flat 636…”
Duque re-presents and re-appropriates one of those in-situ installations in the exhibition space of SALON2060. The installation is a landscape he made out of the remains of a leftover curtain hanging in flat 636, in which he goes back to his own memories of landscapes in his home country of Colombia.
Pauline Doutreluingne – curator SAVVY Contemporary Berlin
“Uncertainty”, site-specific installation, cut second-hand curtains, gold spray paint, printed text
Juan Duque, 2011
