Homo Ludens Exhibition
Guillermo Hevia García + Catalina Poblete
ARCHITECTS
Catalina Poblete, Guillermo Hevia García
LEAD ARCHITECTS
Guillermo Hevia García, Catalina Poblete
YEAR
2022
LOCATION
Valparaíso, Chile
CATEGORY
Museum & Exhibition Interiors
Game and art in motion. How can we incorporate the concept of play into an art exhibition? The Homo Ludens exhibition proposes the challenge of transforming play into a concept that not only organizes the curation of the artworks but also guides the assembly and museography project of the exhibition.
The exhibition takes place in a room that is 54 meters long, 9 meters wide, and 5 meters high, in the Cultural Park of Valparaiso (formerly a prison), which makes it a challenging space to display around 100 artworks and structure an exhibition with 4 sections or thematic axes.
Previous exhibitions held in this space have typically employed two strategies. The first one is to organize everything around the two longitudinal walls and free up the center to display three-dimensional works or sculptures.
The second one is to divide the space using separate partitions as part of the catalog of objects available in the cultural center.
Both strategies were incompatible with the concept of the project, as they generated static and predictable spaces.
The museography for the exhibition conceptualizes play as change and movement, a capacity for transforming the space and the exhibition itself, in order to construct multiple interpretations of the artworks through small mechanical operations that introduce the unexpected.
We consider the unexpected and dynamic to be what characterizes any game, the possibility of completely changing in a single movement.
The museography and the project are organized around 3 mobile devices that are 4 meters long, which allow for the fragmentation or unification of the room and alter the relationship between the artworks.
Visitors will be able to modify the space and will never have the same spatial experience, and therefore, the experience of the artworks. These devices organize 3 similar areas, while the last section alters the partitions belonging to the Cultural Center in a stacked artifact, resembling a game on which a set of artworks will be displayed.
