Hans Haacke.Castillos en el aire, 2012 (Ensanche de Vallecas, Av. del Cerro Molino con Calle del Arte Expresionista, parcela5.32A,B) © Hans Haacke/VEGAP, Madrid, 2012

Hans Haacke

Castles in the Air

domingo 06 mayo 2012
8:11
Politics
Photography
Architecture
Sound
Public Sphere
Criticism
Space
Conceptual Art

Hans Haacke (Cologne, 1936) is considered a pioneer of what has come to be known as institutional critique, a branch of conceptual art that emerged at the end of the 1960s. In this interview, the artist explains the project Castles in the Air (2012), conceived specifically for the Museo Reina Sofía. The piece explores the current state of a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Madrid called Ensanche de Vallecas, where Haacke finds images of the ruins that attest to contemporary society in Spain. The work also lends its name to an exhibition presented from 15 February to 23 June 2012.

In the interview, Haacke explains the process of conceiving and undertaking this small study of Madrid’s outlying areas and the state in which the landscape has been left by the construction and economic crises. In this post-apocalyptic space, inhabited houses share sidewalks with cement skeletons, all in a neighbourhood where the streets are named after different art styles of the 20th century.

Conceptual Art Street with its empty houses. Pop Art Street and its ad posters. Antonio López Street where, this time, the emptiness of the urban spaces is very real. All of these photographs, which form part of the museum exhibition and can be seen in part on this page, reproduce those spaces. Haacke’s voice here is accompanied by recordings made in vicinity of this part of Madrid, creating a sound landscape of the city’s periphery, full of empty spaces and the vegetation that is recovering its place in the wasteland of vacant lots.

Production

José Luis Espejo

Locution

Luis Mata

Acknowledgements

Miguel Espada, Ruth Pérez Chaves

License
Creative Commons by-nc-sa 4.0

Hans Haacke

Castles in the Air

Hans Haacke. Castles in the Air. From February 15 to July 23 2012

Hans Haacke, Artist: Well, as I often have done, also, tried to produce a work that very specifically deals with the context in which it is exhibited.

I knew there would be an exhibition in Madrid, at the Reina Sofía, and I had the ambition to do something specifically with the situation in Spain or in Madrid. When I took the cab from the airport to the centre of town to go and meet with the people at the museum, I noticed, on the right side, an area with trees and streets and streetlamps and benches and everything that you might expect in a new neighbourhood. But there was not a single person and not a single house. That struck me as rather bizarre; I’d never seen anything like it.

Eventually I asked people at the museum: ‘What’s happening there?’ And I was told that around the periphery of Madrid there are many such areas. It struck me as so bizarre that I wanted to see them, and we took a tour in a car around the periphery of the city. And I saw many crazy areas, and eventually we wound up at the south-eastern corner of Ensanche de Vallecas. We stumbled over several buildings that had been started but the construction was stopped. Towers that were in its skeletons and other low level buildings that were meant to be chalets were almost literally ruins.

Plan to go back to the centre of the city and we looked at the map. That the streets there were named after art styles of the twentieth century. There was a pop art street; there was conceptual art street, the minimal art street, figurative, hyperrealist... expressionist street. Took one of these streets, the conceptual art street and there said, on a building... conceptual art...

What I’m familiar with is that big corporations in order to polish their name, to make themselves look good, sponsor any art exhibitions and museums. But here, after a research, I learned that the trigger was something else. Apparently, there was a well-meaning effort to make this an art neighbourhood. There was supposed to be public buildings with art studios, it was meant to be a cultural environment. But there’s nothing. Zip.