Luminous Intensity, Growing up with Fire and Dancing in the Springs

Performance by Emilio Rojas

 

 

This performative tour of Félix Candela’s Concrete Shells: An Engineered Architecture for Mexico and Chicago considers what it meant to grow up surrounded by Candela’s architecture as a child and adolescent in Mexico City. In collaboration with his mother, Emilio Rojas goes back three generations to remember specific personal and political events that took place in Candela’s concrete shells: baptisms, weddings, daily rituals, the 1968 Olympics, student protests and falling in love. The performance questions the relationship between memory and architecture, the ways not only our bodies but our biographies become intrinsically connected to the structures we inhabit and the affective nature of the poetics of space.