Guillermo Santoma
Guillermo Santomà, a Barcelona-based artist and architect, is always one step ahead of anyone who attempts to place his work into one box. His practice traverses architecture, design, sculpture, and scenography, with each creation evolving from and knocking down the one before. Santomà’s process is centred around the idea of architecture as a continuous performance, blending demolition with construction in ways that challenge the limitations of space. From transforming an old church into a spa to assembling a chandelier from raw industrial materials, his approach transcends one-dimensional functionality and flips convention on its head.
Focusing on the ephemeral nature of architecture, Santomà plays with the tension between objects, space, and human agents, where any room he touches becomes a living interface. He redefines typologies by exploring the relationship between architecture and human experience, including the physical space we inhabit into an ongoing dialogue. His work unfolds in the infinity of the construction process, where boundaries between culture, nature, and digital realms blur – shifting and bending the lens through which we perceive the built environment we inextricably exist within.
“To create is to destroy” is the phrase that often appears in descriptions of your approach. Could you talk me through this idea and how it’s reflected in your process?
To deconstruct sounds very elegant, destroy or something similar to demolish is more a part of a constructive process. To build an interface, construction must be part of your life. Our approach to this type of production is always on a 1:1 scale. We understand destruction or construction as a performance where the beginning and the end are intertwined. The importance of a project is not the output, but the relationships that are created between what already exists and what will exist. Construction is like a mnemonic device built by humans.
How do you approach the choice of materials in your work and your relationship to them? In particular, how do you use colour and light as materials within themselves?
Understanding light as a material is key for the typology of the room to exist. A continuous light emanates from screens that blurs the boundary between day and night. The idea of sleep and wakefulness ceases to exist. For this new architecture, day and night are a continuous after. The fiction of continuity is only interrupted when you sleep, the most digital moment of the ancient human. Words have ultimately failed to form images. We still do not know what will come after images.
Colour strengthens the idea of continuity, a spatial glitch that never ends. It is a finish, an envelope like a chroma, not a decoration. The most ephemeral material. The vertices reinforce an idea of geometry that is already obsolete. Paint as a liquid material that transforms into whatever we desire. Colour renders space like a perfect sphere.
An architectural space inherently carries societal implications within its design. What are some insights you’ve gained into the symbiotic relationship between character and the surrounding space? Where does your work fit in that relationship?
Interfaces cannot be separated from the forms of the people who inhabit them. They have always been like the desktop background image. Think of the Windows 98 logo or the Bliss image. Architecture is a material transformed into designed archaeological nature. A design that symbolises the world we inhabit. It determines our way of living, determines us as individuals, and even the body we inhabit.
Within this idea of inhabitation, I wanted to ask about one of your first works – the radical transformation of Barcelona’s historical Casa Horta into a live-in work of art. How would you say living there has transformed yourself and your life? Is your home also constantly transforming?
I am no longer interested in talking about that house as a concrete space but as an initial point of discovery of a technique. There are still traces of architectural elements that aspire to a way of living. Erasing all those traces to become material is the result of what was learned in that construction. The transformation of trompe-l'oeil into a glitch.
How do you find your references you create your own symbolism from them?
References grow from concepts. It is important to blend literature with construction catalogues, spending time in libraries and hardware stores as well as browsing the internet. Overlaying is the only way to accelerate the speed for the body to transform. Representation is no longer useful. The only way to exist is to be a part of it. Understanding that there are no borders. One cannot observe if they are not part of the experiment. Mixing symbolism with fantasy is important. We could identify it as the new mythologies of today, where the boundary between culture and nature has disappeared. Everything is understood as a logistics that happens at different speeds.
Where do you see the future of design and architecture head towards? And for yourself, what directions would you want to take your work in further?
Talking about the future sometimes seems to want to nullify the present and the past. Time is a technology invented by humans to understand space. Understanding time as a lens that projects the distortion of memory forward or backward is crucial to understand the architecture that may come. The question is, how can hardware and software move through this new space at the same speed?
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