Jordicolomer

Trained in art history and architecture, Jordi Colomer has worked extensively in sculpture and video for the past twenty years. He mostly presents his sculptural creations through video and performance because video allows him to control the presentation. In an interview, Colomer once stated that “reality, once captured and transferred to a medium of expression, irredeemably becomes fiction, in the same way that fame, once it takes hold of a human being, converts that person into a fictional character.” This becomes vitally important in an ironic gesture, as Colomer points out in another interview with William Jeffett from the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, “there is the idea of Walter Benjamin who spoke of architecture and film as the arts in which the spectator or the user is inside the work. In the end, I believe all of this is a question of scale: whether the thing is larger or smaller than the persons themselves and not only in material terms.”
In Anarchitekton (2002–04) we can see Colomer’s elaborate games in action. The unusual title takes up an idea of Russian Suprematist artist Kasimir Malevich whose Architektons of 1920–27 were plaster mock-ups of imaginary buildings exemplifying his political and architectural concepts. Something similar was the Dadaists and the Surrealists staging balls with dancers wearing, for example, the at the time brand-new skyscrapers of Manhattan. Colomer presents a more anarchist version of Malevich’s world-changing architecture.
With his whimsical yet rigorous take on contemporary society, Colomer stages performance pieces of an “Everyman” character played by a Romanian actor, Idroj Sanicne, who―as though they were banners or religious icons―carries small-scale sculptures featuring the photographic reproduction of buildings in front the actual buildings. Anarchitekton has been staged in Barcelona, Brasilia, and Bucharest and posits various critiques of contemporary society and the role played by politics and architecture in public spaces.
Anarchitekton starts out in Barcelona where, Colomer declares “Architecture is omnipresent . . . Politics translates itself into architectural gestures.” Colomer begins by looking at the political nature of buildings in the restored area of Diagonal, a Barcelona neighborhood with it decorated “international standard” buildings. These were contrasted with two other areas of the city that were built in the style of “Modernism” during the boom of the nineteen-sixties to accommodate waves of immigrants. The play contrasts the brutalism of modernist residential towers with a more neo-Catalan architecture while demonstrating the ridiculousness of the scenario and the powerlessness of the tiny human, Idroj, against the powers that be. In many cases, the videos show passers-by interacting with Idroj, wondering whether this is a protest against new construction or a performance. It is both. In the nineteen-twenties in the Soviet Union, the choreographed demonstrations were similarly symbolically charged and situated the viewer/participant between a demonstration and a party.
These images are a certain comment on contemporary society and the role of architecture. Through the use of his comic “Everyman,” Idroj Sanicne, Colomer places us in an unusual position of examining our own situation in the world we inhabit through farce and performance artfully filmed. The viewer identifies with the performer, just as Benjamin theorized, yet forces us to look at what we have wrought and how this architecture has shaped us. The project continues.