Jesús Moreno-Granados

Reflexive text for the exhibition project - Caracas, 2009

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Continuo Habitable is an exhibition project through which I understand space as a sequence of patterns that interact with one another. I am interested in approaching space not as a fixed entity, but as a dynamic system where subject, object, and context intersect. From this relationship, I reflect on habitable space and question whether it is something delimited or continuous; whether it belongs solely to the objectivity of the environment or is also constructed through each individual’s intimate perception of it.

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I approach the urban realm as a manifestation of both the tangible and the intangible, a space where technology and the human condition engage in dialogue, generating continuity. From this perspective, habitable space, the subject, and context are conceived as a sequence of modules that give form to space. City and artifact appear as constants that transcend geographic location, since in relation to the subject they weave a context of their own—one that simultaneously generalizes and individualizes the human experience of inhabiting space.

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I am interested in studying this relationship between subject, object, and context from the possibility—or impossibility—of habitability. The landscape thus emerges as a testimony of real space and, at the same time, as a document of perceived space. I begin from the idea that every relationship between object, subject, and context originates in an objective, tangible fact, yet generates a particular space shaped by individual perception. In this sense, what is inhabited is both the physical condition and the perception of it: I inhabit an intimate space that is in constant dialogue with a public one.

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As Gaston Bachelard states in The Poetics of Space: “The lived-in house is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” From this perspective, the project focuses on the relationships between objective space and the space of thought, and on how these may or may not be delimited. I question whether artifacts, as mediators between these two realms, are merely tools or whether they can become habitable spaces for human thought.

The proposal thus revolves around a reflection on the relationship between technology and the sensitive dimension of the spirit, understanding that both manifest the space of thought and influence how we perceive our surroundings. I ask whether habitable space is only that which we physically occupy, or whether the intangible—thought itself and the ungraspable spaces through which it moves—can also be inhabited.

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I understand habitable space as a context shaped by perception. I consider the human being as a mediator between the inner world and the surrounding environment. On a technical level, the proposal evokes traces of habitability by revisiting the place where the tangible and the intangible coexist, observing how space manifests itself through this duality in the urban environment and in the virtual space generated by technology.

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From a poetic standpoint, the articulation of urban environment, technology, and human presence gives rise to what I define as intangible architecture. Taking the object as a point of reference, I expose an ungraspable space contained within it, revealed through specific elements present in the plastic proposal. In this sense, sound or music does not reside in a disc or in the artifact that reproduces it; it exists in an intangible realm that rests upon that support. For this reason, these elements are approached as forms of intangible architecture.

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These intangible architectures expose, through the palpable, an ethereal place and reflect on the capacity of the technical to become habitable. We cannot inhabit a machine physically, yet the machine becomes habitable insofar as it interacts with the user’s thought. In this way, the tangible and the intangible are interwoven through the user’s thinking activity, processed by the artifact. This leads me to question whether this relationship between virtual spaces—thought and artifact—can be considered a habitable space, insofar as the human being exists as a duality of thought and corporeality, manifested within an environment articulated through the objective and the virtual.

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From this perspective, the artistic work refers both to the context in which it is situated and to the individual who engages with it. This intangible architecture speaks simultaneously of subject and context, considering space as a continuous whole. Thus, environment, object, and individual are interconnected, and the habitable becomes a flow articulated through these elements. Landscape is therefore both the urban context and its inhabitant. Within this framework, I present a series of “documents” that may reveal either a specific—real or fictional—fact of objective space, or a particular impression of the intangible space contained within the inhabitant.