"AWSH" project, exhibited at San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid (Spain)_

Jorge Conde presents "A World-Size House", a project created as resident artist at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome (Italy) for the period 2015-16.
"Hecho en Roma" is an exhibition curated by Manuel Blanco and hosted by the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid (Spain).

"A World-Size House" is an artistic investigation on the social, architectural and urban impact derived from the recuperation and transformation of abandoned buildings and degraded urban areas in the city of Rome. To do so, Jorge Conde explores up to seventeen obsolete, disused urban areas or abandoned buildings that in the past three decades have been rescued from oblivion and given a second life as cultural institutions.

The transformation of disused spaces is a fairly effective strategy widely-used by the public and private sectors in may countries and diverse territories not only to promote creation, speed up the cultural scene and articulate society, but also to stimulate growth, provide a gain of prestige, and reactivate declining urban areas. Inserted within a more ambitious renovatio urbis process, this strategy undoubtedly establishes new paradigms and introduces a clear notion of cultural utopia.

Internationally, this strategy has also produced some negative effects such as the application of flawed, inefficient cultural policies, real estate speculation, mutation of urban identity, social division, gentrification, and ghettoization. In Rome’s case specifically, it frequently happens as an exercise of industrial archaeology, a response to a conflict of interest or a way of dealing with a social emergency.

In the city of Rome there are plenty of such examples of urban rebirth, newly-born institutions of different types, ranging from public museums, art production centers and privately-run foundations, to occupied, self-managed, barely legal cultural centers or even historical sites, along with many other hybrid initiatives. All of these projects have to some extent modified or recuperated the memory of several of the most distinctive Roman “quarteri”.

© Miguel Lizana /AECID & Jorge Conde

Project: "A World-Size House"

Exhibition title: Hecho en Roma / Made in Rome
Curator: Manuel Blanco Lage

Institution:  Calcografía Nacional | Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

Address: C/ Alcalá, 13  - 28014 Madrid - SPAIN

Dates: February 24 - April 2,  2017

Schedule: Tuesday through Saturday from 10am to 2pm and from 5pm to 8pm. Sundays and holidays from 10 am to 2 pm

Opening: Friday February 24 at 7pm. Free entrance