Los modelos encontrados: Ready-made y la estética de la descontextualización en los modelos para fundición de Altos Hornos de Vizcaya

• Autores: Javier Fernández Vázquez
• Localización: La imagen de la industria: VI Seminario Internacional sobre Patrimonio de la Arquitectura y la Industria. Propaganda, representación y percepción como patrimonio, 2019, ISBN 978-84-09-10223-5, págs. 429-448
• Idioma: español
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The decline of the Fordist economic model has left a legacy of industrialruins that shelter a wide range of derelict objects. The metropolitan area ofBilbao becomes the background for the biography of a very singular type ofartifacts: the metal casting wooden patterns that belonged to the flagshipcompany Altos Hornos de Vizcaya.In 1997, one year after the closing down of the company, dozens of thousands of patterns fall into oblivion, stored in a condemned warehouse, agroup of spectral and enigmatic objects that haunted the artist and the curator that happened to find then. A decision was taken: the patters wouldbe saved.Their biography hereafter follows a parallel path to the one taken by Bilbao’s adaptation to a Post-Fordist economic model. After languishing in theinvisibility of an industrial ruin, an art exhibition displays them borrowinga significant resemblance to Duchamp´s ready-made objects. Surroundedby futurist, constructivist and surrealist works, these pieces become legitimized as aesthetically pleasing objects.However, a big number of patterns ultimately end up in the antiques market. Following the codes of what Appadurai called ‘aesthetics of decontextualization’, a contemporary heir of the strategies of the ready-made, thepatterns start to inhabit high-end fashion and habitat showrooms.Nevertheless, a undetermined number of patterns is simultaneously abandoned in another industrial ruin. Therefore, their biography is split intotwo different endings, an contradictory fate to a category of objects thatembody in their own materiality, functional and humble, the memory oflabour of bygone working classes and the social structure that had shapedBilbao’s hinterland for generations. A stubborn presence that allows us toreflect on the mechanisms that privilege certain viewpoints about a territory’s industrial past.