ARTEBA FOCUS II

A New Shipping Crate: Variation and Continuity

ARTEBA FOCUS #2/Distrito de las Artes was an opportunity to develop a single project in two phases. The architectonic proposal would, on the one hand, further certain logics and figures that had organized the construction for first edition of the event and, on the other, use variation as an engine of difference.

The figure of the shipping crate used in the first edition to define the elements on which the artworks were displayed and to build the structures in which the fair’s other activities took place was now transformed, its qualities mutated and its formats coupled in new ways.

If in the first stage—that is, the first edition of the event—the challenge lay in how a limited group of elements combined in different ways could provide the spaces required for a variety of situations, we were now more interested in the hybridization of those elements, their reconfiguration, than in their recombination: typological crossings, collaborations between technologies, and series as alteration.

We fine-tuned the ways the artworks combined and comingled with one another and with shipping crates as surrounding materiality until that relationship became specific and localized. It was as if, by giving these elements more time to relate to the place, they could figure out how to interlink, to reproduce, and to vary.