JORGE CONDE

"A World-Size House" project

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Artistic investigation on the social, architectural and urban impact derived from the recuperation and transformation of abandoned buildings and degraded urban areas in the city of Rome. To do so, Jorge Conde explores up to seventeen obsolete, disused urban areas or abandoned buildings that in the past three decades have been rescued from oblivion and given a second life as cultural institutions.

 

The transformation of disused spaces is a fairly effective strategy widely-used by the public and private sectors in may countries and diverse territories not only to promote creation, speed up the cultural scene and articulate society, but also to stimulate growth, provide a gain of prestige, and reactivate declining urban areas. Inserted within a more ambitious renovatio urbis process, this strategy undoubtedly establishes new paradigms and introduces a clear notion of cultural utopia.

 

Internationally, this strategy has also produced some negative effects such as the application of flawed, inefficient cultural policies, real estate speculation, mutation of urban identity, social division, gentrification, and ghettoization. In Rome’s case specifically, it frequently happens as an exercise of industrial archaeology, a response to a conflict of interest or a way of dealing with a social emergency.

 

In the city of Rome there are plenty of such examples of urban rebirth, newly-born institutions of different types, ranging from public museums, art production centers and privately-run foundations, to occupied, self-managed, barely legal cultural centers or even historical sites, along with many other hybrid initiatives. All of these projects have to some extent modified or recuperated the memory of several of the most distinctive Roman “quarteri”.

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Created as residence artist at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome.

Supported by the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development (AECID).