Aromatic cartography (2012)

Spanish Royal Academy of the Arts, Madrid

Digital printing with mineral pigment inks

58×8 cm., 2 sheets (diptych)

Aromatic Cartography is a map of the aromatic conditions that define a place, the Valsaín Forest, conceived as an endless smells of different intensities, tones and graduations in constant evolution according to the time of the year.

… Gone was the roiling of hundreds, thousands of changing odours at every pace; instead, the few odours there were — of the sandy road, meadows, the earth, plants, water — extended across the countryside in long currents, swelling slowly, abating slowly, with hardly an abrupt break. For Grenouille, this simplicity seemed a deliverance. The leisurely odours coaxed his nose. P. Suskind. “Perfume”

Aromatic conditions can define places and Architecture is the frame that transforms those conditions to make them more favorable to the human being. Architecture can change slowly to adjust to those conditions and accommodate local contingency while maintaining overall continuity. Because of its capacity to actualize social and cultural concepts, it is uniquely capable of structuring places in ways not available to other practices.

A place is not a place. A place is not something that is given to us but something that we build. A place does not speak. We imagine what it says, but we must know it is an invention. A place has no limits, it is not limited. It goes beyond what we think. It reaches the other end. A place is not static. It is a dynamic, changing, imitable condition. A place should not be thought in terms of natural or artificial. A place is not represented with topographic maps. A place is an extension of the place, including its history. A place is a trail of some phenomena. A place is not a landscape. It is data that looks like a landscape.

Hence, a place can be defined as a topological set of points -conditions- and its relationships, not as a kind of blank canvas on which to inscribe individual symbolic contents, but as an immense system of links that advocate connections through which the social agreement could be modified.

We have evolved from the Architecture of the object, passing through that of the systems of relationships between those objects, up to one Architecture conceived as a topological space constantly modifying its conditions.

A place results from a phenomenon of physical interaction between things. It is an experience which takes place between different beings that coexist materially in the same place. Then, space is not a thing, not a physical reality that occurs here or there, but is rather a a parametric field, set of relations constantly redefined as these beings interact with each other.