Próximamente.
Visions from the minimal territory.
This is an invitation to take a seat
to be immerged in a conversation and be part of it
in a moment when 'proximity' has fallen into a crisis.
Throughout history, tables have worked as storytelling devices, becoming a powerful communicational emblem, in which the public and the private, the domestic and the territorial can live together. Whereas in Uruguay we are building the black table –a memorial site in public space-, simultaneously, the white table is traveling to Venice, a generous architecture proposed as a screen-table, an available field to practice ‘proximate’ futures. This table invites to take a seat, be immerged in ten human conversations, and be part of them, in a moment when ‘proximity’ has fallen into a crisis.
Próximamente. Visions from the minimal territory proposes ten views which, taken as audiovisual essays at 360 degrees, combine in their execution and staging prediction, fiction and proposition, building a possible atlas of incoming spaces. These conversations, debates, exchanges and coexistences are consequences of a research and work process, which involved in its performance the construction of a filming set in Uruguay, which centrality was given around the white table and, at the same time, around the work with more than sixty people invited from various disciplinary fields, ages and contexts, in order to address the question proposed in the Biennale.
As a diptych, both tables propose spatial and temporal coexistence. The black table is result of a public competition and consists of a large black metallic piece built in a public space in Montevideo, a memorial site, a resource for rethinking the past and how it is brought up to the present, a visiting table from a former prison recreated and turned into an urban table. As a complement, the white table invites to build a place of dialogue and a space from which the future may be outlined. Around the white table, politicians got together and made promises to citizens, a housing cooperative planned its manifesto, activists called us for upcoming demonstrations, a fortune teller predicted the future, scholars predicted their own deaths, teenagers proposed new cities, two enemies fought for their visions and friends celebrated when the table eventually collapsed under its own weight.
Próximamente proposes, from its title and display, trying out a playful answer to the Biennale’s question. In its original language, not only does it refer to spatial closeness, but also temporal, and it is the term used for announcing an event, a new building, or an upcoming film -it is ‘proximately’and, at the same time, ’coming soon’, working as a foretaste of the pavilion, like saying: “what you are going to see is a set of imaginaries under construction, an exercise, a heterotopic future, an invitation to create a closer world”.