Intervention realised in July 2008 at IKON Eastside
"Artists Julio César Castro Carreón, Gabriel Cázares Salas and Rolando Flores Tovar brought their attention to bear on Ikon Eastside and its identity in a district undergoing regeneration. Characteristically concerned to establish a porous relationship between inside and outside, the artists smashed through the gallery walls to open up a view of the urban landscape beyond.
During the residency in Eastside last year the artists documented traces left on recently abandoned buildings by former occupants, honing in on bricked-up entrances, marks remaining after the removal of old signage or fissures caused by decay or vandalism. The inscription of language onto buildings particularly corresponds with Tercerunquinto’s established interest in institutional self-definition through architectonic modes. At Ikon Eastside, the cuts in the walls were designed to spell out the phrase ‘I am what I am’, an open yet ambivalent statement of identity. On the one hand an honest, even humble declaration it might equally be considered an unwillingness to bend. Tercerunquinto’s cutting through the gallery shell also revealed the fragility of an otherwise seemingly tough space. This gesture, though inspired by a local situation, signals a broader rupture between art and society inherent in modernity itself, while asserting the possibility of a very fluid exchange between institutions and their surroundings." - IKON Gallery
Maria del Carmen Carrión, Associate Curator at New Langton Arts, interviewed the Mexican collective TERCERUNQUINTO (Julio Castro, Gabriel Cázares, and Rolando Flores).
MdCC: I would like to ask you now about the most recent project that you developed, a project for the Ikon Gallery, who recently invited you to do a residency and make a proposal. I found that project interesting because like Langton, Ikon is a non-profit space and the two projects respond to very different localities, and different realities.
RF: The project for Ikon is a proposal, that they have accepted, but are now working on the possibility of bringing us back to produce it. We arrived in Birmingham at a very interesting moment, because Ikon is part of a very important urban renewal project where a lot of money is being invested, a project that has the support of the European Union for the redevelopment of an area in the eastside of Birmingham. This is an area that is very depressed in economic terms, an industrial area that has storage facilities, and factories, and is currently going through a process of gentrification. We were thinking about how cultural institutions, commercial galleries, and non-profits are used as “shock troops” to elevate the real estate value of the site, and in this case Ikon was invited to be part of this urban renewal project by opening a new space on the eastside. We started thinking about the relationship between the institution and its context, and how the institution might do a sort of honest act of defining itself in the middle of this real estate strategy. It is a strategy that has a very concrete and practical aspect that involves the displacement of people who live in the area.
Gabriel Cazares: They inject an enormous amount of money and the people who live there can’t afford to pay rent, and they end up being displaced.
MdCC: What was the proposal that you presented?
RF: The proposal was very simple. We gravitated around a phrase, and the metaphor it created. The phrase was “I am what I am”, a phrase that can be read as an act of honesty.
JC: It is a form of apparent humility, but it can also come across as something extremely arrogant, it can have that double interpretation.
RF: We proposed to demolish a section of the building, and with this material design the sign for the institution, to present that double entendre of being defined by what you already are, and what constitutes you.
GC: Just to clarify, the new facility that Ikon is going to occupy in the eastside is a previous storage facility — a quite emblematic and representative construction in the area. As such, the institution was using the space of someone who had been previously displaced because of the renewal strategy, something that is reflected in the current urban phenomena that the place is going through.
RF: We wanted to design a sign that is still a sort of architectonic element that gives identity to the institution.
GC: There is a really close relationship between the Ikon project and the project at Langton, in the sense that here we are also proposing that the institution redefine itself.