URBAN BACKSTAGES

Edificios Embarazados / URBAN STAGES
1998–2012
Flipping formats: dérive photography, screening, multimedia installation, performance

This project originated in a dérive through the urban fabric surrounding Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires (1998), conducted together with Carolina Van der Meulen and Galatea Temerlin. From this shared exploration, Juliana Herrero developed the photographic series Edificios Embarazados, investigating the latent poetics of a city in transformation—its provisional surfaces, scaffolding, and textile coverings.

Buildings under renovation appear as uncanny bodies: wrapped, suspended, and “pregnant” with change, oscillating between exposure and concealment. The images capture transitional states as moments of tension between visibility and invisibility, structure and skin.

Selected works were first presented in X-Position BA (Semper Depot, Vienna, 2002), later continuing as a traveling format at the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam. This early international reception positioned the work within broader discussions of architectural temporality and spatial transformation.

The video brings to life within a heart beat photographs from the series Pregnant buildings taken by the artist during a derive experience in the surroundings of Plaza de Mayo in 1998. As an attempt to capture the ephemeral “clothing” of the city within its dressing and undressing once again, this work tries to grasp a present in continuous change. The urban envelope quotes a “filmic” experience of other times, where behind the curtain, the city, hides its alienation of production, the making off of the new. The video is intervened with a performance by Ivana Reyero, live, that focussed on a rhythmical transformation.

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‘Under the visible fashions which disappear and reappear on the trivial surface of contemplated pseudo-cyclical time, the grand style of the age is always lo- cated in what is oriented by the obvious and secret necessity of revolution. ‘
Guy-Ernest Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 6 “Spectacular Time”
Source: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/
*Pregnant Buildings* (1998) is a photographic work emanated out of a derive experience in five blocks and squares around Plaza de Mayo. Inspired on the Situationist International (SI) of the 60, a portrait of Buenos Aires at the edge of the millennium (…)