Landmark

I go back to the translator, I do it on purpose, and I write inscripción. I want to use that word because as a landmark (marca/inscripción) I think of it as psychic inscription: the place of language and the expression of affects in the psychoanalytic field. I find the word enrolment. That word in Spanish means enrolado. If I add an extra L to that word in Spanish, I have enrollado. Both are almost the same but used for different meanings and context, my translation of this words will be: something tangible or intangible that is wrapping you or an object, a situation where you are very involved, or when an object has been rolled-up by something.

Landmark, Roberto Uribe-Castro’s installation, is literally wrapping-around (enrolada/enrollada) Ned’s Point Fort in Buncrana, Ireland. Rolls of white/red tape unrolled and then wrapped-up into the Fort by Roberto and some local artists. Ned’s Point Fort is one of several Napoleonic batteries built along the shores of Lough Swilly in county Donegal, to defend the northwest of Ireland. It was part of a scheme to fortify Lough Swilly and Lough Foyle against French Invasion during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, near the once important naval town of Buncrana. The Fort current form largely dates to works completed between 1812 and 1813. At that time Ireland was under British rule.

On the day of Landmark’s opening Roberto stated “this material, the white/red tape, is a material very truthful to its time: is made from plastic, it is functional, is economic, cheap and industrially mass produced. We could say it is a material of the time of capitalism”.  

The white/red tape has a very specific function: to warn us from possible dangers. It announces a change, prevents a boundary from being breached, warns us that something is happening in that place. It alerts us. In fact, it is very effective in its message. But as Roberto says “after its short span of use it becomes obsolete. It is disposable. It becomes garbage, waste.”

With Landmark Uribe-Castro manages to bring the red/white tape into dialogue with all those respected and admired materials so important in the history of architecture: concrete, steel, glass, plaster, marble… The tape comes to occupy the stage, which, because of the tapes eye-catching appearance and its ability to alert us, immediately turns the space into a prominent place, a main stage a ‘Landmark’ a marca an inscripción.

For Uribe-Castro architecture becomes a scenography, where the red/white tape, which is used in less glamorous settings, moments that warn of heavy labour and transformation, shares the stage with the other important materials used in architecture to frame actions and moments. 

Landmark is a work that in its two scenographic dimensions achieves a temporal dialogue with the place where it is inserted (marca/inscripción) making evident the theatricality that is inherent to the place. A theatricality that makes architecture full of symbolism, releasing it from that functionality that for so long, especially after the Modern Movement, has claimed to be its main objective: “form follows function”. 

A movement, Roberto explains, in which he and many other “architects were formed. An architecture with answers and affirmations”. The heritage of a modernism that claimed to be free of useless decorations and that made architecture more in line with the ‘modern’ man. “A practice based on non-debatable truths. An architectural practice based in answers that came from abroad, answers that corresponded to a discourse that had nothing to do with the reality in which I grew up in Bogotá, Colombia”. 

Roberto shared with us on the opening of Landmark that the History of Colombian Architecture that he had learnt at university was contained in a book written by Silvia Arango, and that in this book, the History of Colombian Architecture basically begins with the colonial cities, an architecture that then becomes republican with styles imported from France and England, which then becomes modern with the arrival of the railway and the airports, once again French, English and German architecture.

An architecture that always gave a glimpse of European architectural history and which, Uribe-Castro emphasises, always shared parallels with the way “I learned the history of my country as a child: a single page that referred to thousands of years before the arrival of Spaniards and Europeans into the new continent. A History that unfolds with the arrival of Columbus, and then, develops into a discourse that once the Republic began seemed to make more sense”.

That Republic of which Uribe-Castro speaks is the First Republic of New Granada, known disparagingly as La Patria Boba. The adjective was first quoted by Antonio Nariño in one of his articles published in “Los toros de Fucha”, in a sarcastic manner, referring to the way in which his detractors perceived his government. The term later became popular as a form of condemnation of the founding war between centralists and federalists, which was perceived as the beginning of the social and political fragmentation of the nascent republic.

This period was marked by division, conflicts between provinces, internal wars and institutional disorder. This Patria Boba was also the beginning of a short-lived civil war (December 1812 to January 1813) in the city of Bogota. While this civil war was being fought in our fledgling country, the Fort at Ned’s Point was being built. 

Colonial legacies of a complex past that are as relevant today as they were in 1812-1813. Each colonialism is different, and each colonised society has elements of uniqueness. Despite that, it is possible to see strong similarities between colonised societies. In settler societies the position and the role of the colonised and coloniser can be laid out in stark duality, but beneath the surface there is undoubted evidence of mixing. Consequently, settler colonial societies and their successor societies are defined by mestizaje. 

Uribe-Castro defines himself as a mestizo in his opening speech, to explained us that therefore, he understands that the History of Architecture comes from a ‘western’ way of thinking where the line that separates the environment from the self needs to be drawn, an imaginary line in space that marks an inside and an outside. He states that this line “is a political act of defining oneself and the other. Unlike other cultures, such as the native peoples of our country where this line is more porous, and in some cases non-existent”. 

It is the same for Roberto as it is for me, as mestizos we live between these two worlds. The strong western heritage and the ancestral knowledge of the different indigenous communities that survive in our territory. Roberto says that as a mestizo “I find myself between these two worlds, I grew up behind the walls that protect our private property and at the same time surrounded by the exuberant nature of our country. I find myself on that threshold in terms of space and time”.

The label mestizo has been most used in relation to Latin America. Sometimes that use conveys a sense that, as a result of mestizaje (mixing), Latin American societies succeed in avoiding the worst excesses of other settler societies, but despite occasional pride in our mestizo (mixing) nature, colonised Latin American societies were and are exercises in white dominion. 

However, mestizaje (mixing) in relation to Ireland and white settler society in relation to Latin America are not commonly used terms. As I write this text, I realise that the Spanish term for mestizaje (mixing) is not a common place in English, as a white settler society is not for us either, at least in Colombia. Then, I immediately understand the fissures in meaning opened during translation from one language to another. An in-between space, a liminality. 

Nestor Braunstein (2001) says that there is no primary or first ‘writing’, that there is something before and that is why writing is always translating, that is, bringing a word a thought a previous writing to a new medium of unedited letters, to a chain of signs that are written “all writing trans-transports, tra(ns)-lates, trans-fers, over-lays (über-setzt) and carries words, even in oneself, from one province to another (from unconscious to preconscious, from preconscious to consciousness), between two persons, between many, from one form of expression to another, from one language to a different one. To ‘understand’ something is already to translate what another said into what one heard. We are all translators and interpreters.

For example, in German, interpretation is Deutung and the long Spanish title of Freud’s seminal work: La Interpretación de los sueños (The Interpretation of Dreams), it is simply Die Traumdeutung in German. And what is Deutung? Well, it comes from the name of the country, Germany, Deutschland, Deutsch is the language spoken in Deutschland. Deuten is to put into deutsch, to bring into the language spoken by the people that, in the Middle Ages, was written in the dominant language, which was Latin. To interpret deuten is to translate into the language of the common people what belongs to the culture of the scholars. Therefore, to interpret and translate means: to make accessible, to give access, to unveil. 

So, I decided that the most contemporary notion of mestizaje in English might be the word hybridity. A concept popularised by Homi Bhadha when writing about indigenous Asian literate in the context of colonialism, while in an attempt to counter the hegemony of colonial discourse. Bhabha argued that it was impossible to view pure coloniser and colonised positions in colonial society. What existed was a hybrid culture, neither one nor the other but formed by encounter of both. 

However, regardless of hybridity of indigenous and incomer over the centuries, racism prevails in Latin America and elsewhere. Today, despite formal decolonisation, places such as USA and EU continue to erect walls and barriers to maintain the hierarchies of racial privilege first established by colonialism. History shows us that segregation continues to undermine the ideals of brotherhood, equality and freedom on which we have built the world we live in today. 

Uribe-Castro reminds us that the architecture that he learned from European and foreign books always fell short of ‘understanding’ (interpreting/translating), the complex reality of Colombia, and a world marked by displacement, poverty and racism. Therefore, he was able to realize that these texts and this architecture gave him answers to questions that he had not asked himself. Indeed, the text to be read was a text written in stones all over the urban spaces, a silenced, hidden text that runs parallel to academic texts “with one difference: instead of keeping the scratches and stains inside its pages, this text (the city) usually shows itself naked and honest before the eyes of those who know how to read its surface”. And it was precisely this need to understand and ask his own questions, which led him to turn into art. 

I think of the red/white tape, the split created by the two colours, to warn of a limit, a boundary, a threshold that must not be crossed. An optical illusion of half-red and half-white that is prolonged as if it were to the end of the tape, when it is used to warn us “do not-pass”. But this optical illusion is revealed when the tape is used for another purpose, as Uribe-Castro does it in Landmark. When the tape is unrolled and then inserted in the buildings or spaces that the artist uses for the intervention an imbalance between red and white is unveiled, revealing the illusion that the tape is perfectly balanced, in Landmark the red/white size exactitude in the tape disappears, and what emerges is a hybrid pattern where ultimately the accuracy of the red/white dissection disappears. 

I asked Roberto why that was? And he replied that it “is a flaw in the ‘machine’, an impossibility to produce such accuracy”, which one only notice “when using the tape in other ways”. That is why Uribe-Castro uses this material, it has been through materials, something shared by the Arts and Architecture, especially in sculpture, that he has managed to “question and understand these thresholds of time and space that do not enter in books of History of Western Art and Architecture”. 

The illusion of the accuracy of the ‘machine’ makes me think of the idea of progress and the discourse of science. For Lacan the seed of segregation is to be found in the discourse of science and the modern subject correlative to it, which, to produce knowledge of its objects, must proceed by decomposition, dissection, separation, reduction and classification. To satisfy this method, science must objectify the subjects; that is, by applying to the speaking subjects (suject parlant/parletre) what has been at the beginning of its efficacy in the field of phusis. This logic of dissection and classification creates and multiplies new classes, in the logical sense, and carries within it the worm of segregation, for it constitutes the isolations, the concentrations, the new inter-human distributions which Lacan proposes to call the effect of segregation. 

And then, I remember Roberto’s words on the day of Landmark’s inauguration saying that “History of Architecture comes from a ‘western’ way of thinking where the line that separates the environment from the self needs to be drawn , an imaginary line in space that marks an inside and an outside, a political act of defining oneself and the other” which now resonate with Lacan’s proposal to emphasise the phenomena of segregation as its organised, concerted, rationally planned characteristics, based on the great tragic experiences of 20th century history: the Nazi extermination camps and the Soviet concentration camps.

But as Landmark is inserted in Ned’s Pont Fort, and as the Fort was built during 1812-1813 at the same time as my country was experiencing the first attempt at Independence from Spanish colonial rule, the so-called Patria Boba. Both the existence of the Fort and my country’s first attempt at independence are related to events that took place in Europe between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century: the independence of the thirteen English colonies in North America, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. I would therefore like to complement Lacan’s great tragic experiences of the 20th century with these two passages written almost 100 years before in my American continent:

“Some colonised populations where lead by the ‘one drop’ rule. For African Americans, for example, descendants of slaves, there was a ‘scientific’ calculus which allowed for judgments on ‘Africanness’: the mulato (one white parent and one black); the quadroon (three-quarters white, one-quarter black); the octoroon (a person with one-eighth African ‘blood’); sang mele (a person with one-sixty-fourth African ‘blood’)”.

“It is known that neither Indian nor Negro contends in dignity and esteem with the Spaniard; nor do any of the others envy the lot of the Negro, who is the most dispirited and despised… If the mixed-blood is the offspring of a Spaniard and an Indian, the stigma disappears at the third step in descent because” it is held as systematic that a Spaniard and an Indian produce a mestizo; a mestizo and a Spaniard, a castizo; and a castizo and a Spaniard, a Spaniard… Because it is agreed that from a Spaniard and a Negro a mulato is born; from a mulato and a Spaniard, a morisco; from a morisco and Spaniard, a torna atrás (return-backward); and from a torna atrás a tente en el aire (hold-your-self-in-mid-air), which is the same as a mulato, it is said,  and with reason, that a mulato can never leave his condition of mixed blood, but rather is the Spanish element that is lost and absorbed into the condition of a Negro… The same thing happens from the union of a Negro and Indian, the descent begins as follows: Negro and Indian produce a lobo (wolf); lobo and Indian, a chino; and chino and Indian, an albarazado (spotted); all of which incline towards the mulato” 

We are always so far away and yet so close. If we can ask the right questions or as long as chance allows us an encounter an experience that turns into an event, a discovery “that marks an important stage in something – synonym milestone”, that reveals something new, a text, a previously unseen trace that is a novelty, a possibility. A moment that gives access, that unveils something allowing interpretation and translation into a language that is common to us. To understand. We are far away and yet so close if something, that once is seen “will help you to know where you are, a landmark”, which, if we follow Derrida’s terminology, would be a projection in time of certain spatial relations of which our psyche knows nothing, relations derived from an ‘arch-scripture’ and ‘traces’ allowing you to see clearly from a distance. 

I have written this text starting from the work of Roberto Uribe-Castro and following the thread that free association has been carrying, between one language and another, between one knowledge and another, in a constant back and forth between translation and interpretation of the work translation and interpretation of the installation, of the words of Roberto and others, authors that I like and who have left a mark, a mark on me. My Landmarks, I could say. Braunstein (2001) says that thought and word are the very form and essence of time… until we write. When we do so, relations of space become evident to us. Time becomes spatialised. And when we read what we write we notice that those spatial relations that make the text possible have been temporalized in speech. If what we do when we think, write and speak is to decipher previous inscriptions and order them in time, then space will have preceded the time. And in this sense Roberto Uribe-Castro Landmark’ makes space a place by means of sculptural writing. 

I believe that art emerges in a liminal space, in the interstices between cultures, the site of hybridity where displacement, subversion, renegotiation, newness, of cultures and identities, and multiple positionality becomes possible, where ultimately polarities are dissolved. A way of rejecting, by means of Eros, the death drive that directs the discourse of science. An Eros that resists the binary view of colonial and postcolonial society because the fact is that the binary nature of that society continues and reproduces itself. Of itself, mestijaze is a factual observation; it does not dismantle power. 

Thank you Roberto, Artlink and Jessica for allowing me to use your work to write this text.