Guillermo Santoma: An ecosystem between architecture and design

Santoma pushes the concept of identity to extremes. He destructs in order to create something new and meaningful.

DS.WRITER:

Σοφία Θρουβάλα

Image: Parainfrastructure, 2021 | Source: guillermosantoma.com

Guillermo Santomà is a Catalan artist and designer, known for the spaces he creates. He mainly focuses on the reuse and repurposing of objects. He works in different formats and methods as he moves flexibly between design, architecture, sculpture and scenography, while often all of the above are creatively intertwined in a common body. Always occasioned by a simple mechanism or a structure, architectural, technological, construction, etc., which is collected or utilized in situ, Santoma creates complex spaces-environments accessible to the public that is invited to acclimatize and experience situations invested with colours, lights and music.

In particular, his work is characterized by an intense interest to redefine and re-systematize materials, objects, colours and spaces, driven by the question: how could such a space, such an object, function in a society of reactions and interactions such as our own? Santoma pushes the concept of identity to extremes, attempting to create environments capable of accommodating conflicting groups within a constructed space. Could two fundamentally - ideologically and politically - opposite people sit in the same chair?

GAS, 2021 Spazio Maiochi, Kaledoscope Magazine | Image source: guillermosantoma.com

In 2019, Santoma designed a multimedia construction for Milan Design Week, in collaboration with the RIMOWA studio and the contemporary art magazine KALEIDOSCOPE: a car, covered in the iconic RIMOWA aluminium that seems to walk the line between functional object and art. The method he follows is creation through destruction, a key method to transmute anything he desires into something new. In this case, the car that he used as the core of the GAS project, which remains functional, was covered externally with aluminum sheets, effectively hiding the car and thus creating a new object, whose identity is unrecognizable. Its placement in space seems surreal, as through the scenography the functional characteristics of the vehicle, i.e. safety and flexibility, are nullified. The seats are covered with blue factory paint and the space inside and outside is lined with bright lights, while finally the oversized speakers installed inside the car fill the space with music, thus creating a polymorphic object-sculpture, a reference of course to the 1963 iconic work by Ed Ruscha "Sixteen Gas Stations", in which the photographer reinterprets the new American landscape centered on gas stations.

GAS, 2021, Spazio Maiochi, Kaledoscope Magazine | Image source: guillermosantoma.com

All the above features and obsessions can be traced in many of his subsequent works. More specifically, last October Santoma created an installation in the factory area of Matadero, Madrid, under the title "pista de baile". In fact, he completely converted the space into a multimedia party. The installation was in collaboration with Simon and the studio ProtoPixel, while contemporary dancers from the group Ciudad Bilar Exagerar participated in the installation. The installation poses the question of whether a construction like this can be architecture since it is housed within something already architected, or if it is ultimately an expanded design object within which events occur. Can constructed space be an object after all? Could it be an ecosystem?

Matadero, Madrid, 2021 | Image source: guillermosantoma.com

He responds with his last installation "para infrastructure" of the same year. In a factory landscape, the artist uses abandoned walls and structural elements to structure his own surreal ecosystem. We meet again the elements of technology, the natural and the constructed and of space and participation, characteristics that harmonize in a single setting. The gelatin that covers the entire part of the damaged building is used as a protective shield, a new roof within which plants and even fish now live. The element of music and pop lighting is also present. Thus a para-structure is created, something that coexists with something else in space. A displacement of the visible into something parallel and indefinite, into an ecosystem.