Rosell Meseguer
Mc City
The construction of the world around us, like a panorama of materials, colours and shapes that determine what it will be like, is a story of possibilities – potential fictions or realities in action. Everything is reality but appears to be fiction.
Koselleck believed that the history of Modernity emerged alongside a particular way of experiencing the temporality of the world; it emerged with the acquired experience of the historical field, that is: events usually frustrate expectations. Frustrated expectations generate unforeseen and unpredictable phenomena; other potentional fictions, other realities in act.
MC City is the unexpected and speculative construction of the city, in this case, Miami opposed but also in association with the construction of the European city, giving visibility to the excess against the invisible -speculation, desire and capitalist market mode-. The project is based on the creation of local files from the Miami newspaper: The Miami Herald in dialogue with Spanish newspapers. The headlines of the news published in the press, situate us in the diverse neighborhoods that build the city - marking the society that inhabits it and providing it with layers of visual, conceptual and numerical information-.
A European car moves between the Miami metropolis and the exuberant Florida botany, between luxury and marginality, between the centre and the periphery, between fiction and reality.
Gean Moreno (curator & visual artist, lives and works in Miami)
Real Estates Stories, 2010
Despite tireless filters that mediate the image of a city, despite these unchanging iconographies of movies and commercials, the cities continue to be complex and generate structures: Miami is no different. Intimate alterations, the almost invaluable feedback loops, unexpected logic, socially hierarchical habits and tax codes of conduct and their continuous violations, waves of immigrants and thought that they matter. All these things make really unstable our city, despite what seem to suggest a perfect row of buildings facing the sea, which are repeated over and over again in the initial sequences of movies and television programs.
In our partnership, it was important to avoid the temptation to develop a line of investigation which impose preconceived ideas, both external and those caused by a too usual local look over the city. Things were to develop organically, feed on these many complexities generated by the city. Anyone who was the final experience that develops around Miami, this should be immanent forces (...). We had to work bottom up, and from the inside out.
Work in collaboration between Rosell Meseguer and Adler Guerrier started without a concrete plan. It was deliberate. It began with tours around the city, long conversations and meetings to determine a work strategy. We had to tear down and start from scratch. Adler will carry Rosell by the city and give extensive walks, in such a way that she could experience some of these heterogeneous and uneven textures present in Miami. Make her feel some of the tensions that occur and evaporate across a neighbourhood or when are an enclave to another. (…)
During the process of work, the project - that it threatened to be eternal - became an archive of printed materials and photographs that covered from floor to ceiling, a wall of more than 6 metres; a huge bank of digital images that renouncing their aesthetic value -whatever this- for the production of internal links and trade-offs that embodied the complex urban and suburban panoramas of the city. The purpose of all this was not so much offer a «vision» of Miami in itself, but rather suggest that the city is a large and unstable field of textures and emotional impacts produced.
A project, however, it is not a city. The map and the territory are not the same - as Borges taught us. Finally, Rosell and Adler, both considered that the intersection between the real stories and the real estate - as happens in the movies «based on real events» and given the large number of foreclosed properties and posters for sale of real estate that stumbled - provided a land as rich enough to capture some of the bizarre complexity of the city.
Thus arises Real Estates Levels, which marries perfectly the atmosphere of a film of suspense, a thriller, with the bleak landscape of that of another (real?); Miami that flourishes. From Coconut Grove, Liberty City, Brickell or Morning Side, the artists explore the symbolic potential existing between the language of money and the urban landscape. The result is Real Estates/Levels, a metaphorical file, a plural and shared diary on the polyphony born in this delicate line that embraces the public and the private.
The final work maintains certain aspects of the initial file that produced it and tries to incorporate other forms such as billboards. One of the most interesting aspects in my opinion is to think about the vast amount of images of infrastructure - power lines, fences, urban networks - who survived to the final screen. I think, in a sense, they are representative of the assumptions that guided the project: that of less relevance are the obvious and photogenic qualities which set a city, its intangible - although very real - materials and textures; things that seem to not be there or are immaterial, as the electricity travelling through high-voltage power lines, are the true forces that mark the urban scene and generated the tectonic morphologies that organize our daily lives.