Against the extravagance of desire

Solo exhibitionsSite-specificSpaceProcessPerformanceSculptureMuseum

Dec 29

Written By Lou Calderón

View of the site-specific (before performance). Photo: Joaquín Cortes and Román Lores. Courtesy: Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

View of the exhibition CARLOS BUNGA. CONTRA LA EXTRAVAGANCIA DEL DESEO, at the Palacio de Cristal. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. April, 2022. Archivo fotográfico del Museo Reina Sofía.

View of the site-specific from the inside (before performance). Photo: Joaquín Cortes and Román Lores. Courtesy: Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

View of the site-specific from outside the Palacio de Cristal (before performance). Photo: Joaquín Cortes and Román Lores. Courtesy: Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Photos: Joaquín Cortes and Román Lores. Courtesy: Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía +info

With this site-specific construction, Bunga questions the conception of architecture as a language of power, willingly dispensing of traditional materials and opting instead for the precariousness of packing cardboard and adhesive tape. Against the Extravagance of Desire researched the changing environment surrounding the Palace that hosts the exhibition and the context in which it was originally built.

The ephemeral nature of the artist’s installations is inevitably bound up with two circumstantial concepts: time and place. Bunga opens a new dimension for the experience of a viewer who not only contemplates the work but enters and transforms it. The cardboard structure that composed the installation blended with the iron and glass building in which it was placed, giving rise to a hybrid and changing environment: "A performative, spontaneous and unstable space, built, used and destroyed much more easily than conventional architecture," as states the exhibition coordinator, Soledad Liaño. The artist directed our attention to all these nomadic architectures, made of precarious materials.

He also blurs the boundary between interior and exterior, making the building a participant in the external environment, a constantly changing natural cycle that defines and conditions it. Moreover, nature vindicates its space in the cardboard construction and raises its voice through the leaves trapped in the paint.

“Against the Extravagance of Desire”, the artist states, “is an attitude of resistance informed by all the material that surrounds us and takes us farther and farther away from the spiritual essence which ought to reign in our lives. This project is an invitation to think with me of other ways of existing, being and inhabiting amidst the duality we live in.”

View of the site-specific (before performance). Photo: Joaquín Cortes and Román Lores. Courtesy: Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.