Proyecto Meta-recinto (Meta-place Project)

 

Alicia Barney, 1995

 

Walking through the La Nieves neighborhood in Bogotá, a busy sector that is overloaded with commercial advertising, inside a large house marked by deterioration of abandonment, which has already been recuperated by the project, will be the site of META-RECINTO. A large, dimly lit space, marked on one side by a great NAVE (SHIP) and at the bottom, a luminous raft, in which visitors may sit as they listen to the gentle RUMOR DE OLAS (RUMOR OF THE WAVES).

 

This text was painted in watercolor together with another two illustrations of RECINTO in shadows and of the BALSA LUMINOSA. Two architectural plans of the renovation of the house in La Nieves. The architect Humberto Castro Soto used this to make a detailed budget and a collage of photographs of the houses of the sector. This proposal is a homage to Fellini’s “And the Ship Sails On” (1983). Apart from the probability of a public space such as META-RECINTO being constructed, it is a call for residents of Bogota to take responsibility for the space in which their lives evolve. Do they want a META-FACILITY for their spirit or a paradise for vandals to defecate in?