A Site to be Seen
Spanish artist brings a taste of Barcelona to Santa Fe’s Museum Hill
A Spaniard has conquered Museum Hill. Visitors walking or driving by Martí Anson’s artwork — built for SITE Santa Fe’s 7th Annual Biennial opening this month — often mistake it for a church.
Located off Camino Lejo, directly across from the Museum of International Folk Art and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Anson’s red brick building is a miniature version of an old flour factory in Barcelona, Spain.
“This is a stupid thing to make,” Anson said Friday as the New Mexico flag fluttered from the meticulously stacked bricks behind him. “It’s to take a political idea from my city.”
The original factory stirred controversy when the city of Barcelona wanted to replace it with a shopping center. Preservationists screamed; officials offered alternative proposals ranging from moving the building down the road to chopping it into sections and placing it in storage. The battle over the 1897 building still rages.
“My idea is to take the factory and put it here like the Spanish Colonials,” Anson continued. “It’s like a joke about saving my heritage.”
The artist’s miniaturized replica stands 24 feet long by 10 feet high. Built from ceramic-fired brick, it awaits El Paso brown stucco and a pitched red roof of corrugated metal. The back side is windowless because the building is only for looking, not for using, he explained. Tiny arched windows and doorways line its three stories. A video camera attached to the chain-link fence is capturing and condensing 2 1/2 weeks of labor into five minutes.
“We look like Godzilla” on tape, joked SITE staffer Michael Gurule, who is helping Anson with the project. “We look like we (stand) halfway up the building.
“I told him we should build a swimming pool inside,” he added, laughing.
For the record, the floor is dirt — again, because the building is to look at and not to use, Anson said.
In accordance with biennial curator Lance Fung’s ephemeral theme, Anson’s replica is supposed to be destroyed and/or recycled when the SITE Santa Fe’s “Lucky Number Seven” International Biennial ends Jan. 4. But some fans want it to become a permanent fixture.
Julianne Alderman mistook the piece for a church as she was walking down Camino Lejo.
“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “I’m from Baltimore and I spend a lot of time walking. This is everything the Southwest is about. You never know what you’re going to get when you walk around the corner.”
Department of Cultural Affairs Director Stuart Ashman isn’t sure what will become of the piece.
“We’re just letting him build it as an exhibit to have Museum Hill as a site for (the Biennial) to promote our museums,” he said.
“The artist doesn’t care,” Ashman added. “We could do an adaptive thing with it. There’s possibilities — it could be a storage shed. But that would require maintenance. Or it could be a pavilion in memory of his piece.”
It could also be of use to the Santa Fe Botanical Gardens, which inked a deal with the city of Santa Fe to develop a trail through the nearby arroyo, Ashman added.
“We’re considering it an exhibit, and then we’ll go from there,” he said.
Anson appreciated the irony.
“It’s exactly like my country,” he said, laughing. “I don’t know if somebody will destroy it or if it stays here forever.”
The mini-maquette echoes a previous project Anson built in Barcelona. That piece was inspired by Fitzcarraldo a would-be Peruvian rubber baron who had to drag a boat over a steep hill to access rich rubber territory. In 1982, Werner Herzog directed Klaus Kinski in an epic movie about the obsessive hero. So Anson built his own yacht inside a museum.
“That is like a joke, too,” he said. “I stay in the museum 55 days working very hard. Nobody knew that I cannot take it out because it is this much wider than the door,” he added, spreading his fingers three or four inches apart.
“All my work is stupid because I love wasting time.”
