Espacio Relativo

Spanish-English

165 x 294 mm

Graphic design: Naranjo-Etxeberria

Limited edition: 600 copies

Photography: Roberto Ruiz

Texts by: Johanna Caplliure, Sonia Fernández Pan, Bruno Alves de Almeida

“It would appear that the development of spatial awareness sprang from the combining of perceptive action and the user’s experience with place. Space would be indefinable as a static redoubt. Not only due to the ways in which one positions oneself in the terrain, but rather because this space, immersed as it is in endless transformations that go beyond the passage of time, becomes an interminable sphere of possibilities. Space is possibility. And at times it strengthens and weakens, as Giorgio Agamben would state in his time. That is, a place that, in its very lack of action, its inaction, appears to be teeming with action itself. An action that is activated by its ineffectiveness.

We thus find ourselves facing the repertoire of a great city that is clad in avenues, streets, walls, circuits, archways, railings and fences. They all clamour for their own place. A hierarchy of common spaces that we read as codes of entry, exit, transition, prohibition or closing off. Rafa Munárriz unfurls their meaning. He enriches, in the possibility of inaction, the inappropriate and inappropiable forms of these urban objects. Removed from all formal experience with materials, the sculptures and installations urge us towards a reconsideration of the urban modes of living, beyond our experience as subjects. In fact, we could observe in the choosing of these objects, these city furnishings, a questioning of how the user’s ways of doing have the effect of constraining each plot of lived-in space and filling it with meaning. This, in the hands of Munárriz, plays down its primary function and seizes an ending with no conclusion, without a plot of closure, or of unambiguous conception” (Johanna Caplliure, curator).

Espacio relativo (‘Relative Space’) is the publication that illustrates the exhibition and project of the same name by Rafa Munárriz, which was named the winner of the second edition of the competition Primera Fase. Programa de Producción Artística Comunidad de Madrid-DKV.