OAXACA––The monumental site-specific, outdoor installation, comprising more than 100,000 clay bricks, takes on a city-like feel in a largely uninhabited area of the port town of Puerto Escondido.
Near the artist’s Tadao Ando-designed Fundación Casa Wabi, Bosco Sodi’s Atlantes, a gridded 8 cube by 8 cube installation, “is a pleasing intertwining of art and mathematics, Wallpaper writes.
Each of the 64, 2-square-meter cubes comprises 1,600 brick ‘timbers’ handmade by Sodi and a team of local craftsmen in a traditional rustic kiln with wood, coconut shells, and jacaranda seeds. There are a total of 102,400 terracotta-hued pieces, fired in 40 batches over nearly 1,000 hours and arranged in a gridded formation.
Wallpaper*
Each cube, for those of us still using the U.S. Standard system of measurement, is massive at approximately 22-square feet. It’s this monumental scale and their recurrent rectilinear pattern that we find the work’s gravitas and reach.
The installation allows visitors to completely immerse themselves in the experience of the varied light play throughout each day and night at throughout the course of the year.
Standing among the cubes, the dramatic sightlines of the landscape are reconfigured according to the viewer’s orientation. this intends to emphasize the power of perspective and induce a feeling of reverence and awe in response to the surrounding landscape.
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Also throughout the course of the year, as a result of its coastal setting, the installation will weather and evolve.
The structure will weather over time, tracing ‘a sense of the land’s entropy through erosion and the flora and fauna that will eventually dwell in its corridors. Each of the 614,400 brick faces will slowly succumb to the mountains, desert and ocean that frame the artwork; the fate of Atlantes hanging in equilibrium
Wallpaper*
Love or loathe this installation from the world of contemporary ceramic art and contemporary ceramics? Sound off in the comments section below.
Anyone with the dedication and vision to make all the clay bricks makes the argument for the projects inherent worth. The fact that so many participate in the building and taking down of the wall is significant especially with the recent debates of “walls” in the US!