„In Buenos Aires, I documented buildings wrapped in protective tarps during renovation, likening them to pregnant architectures (edificios embarazados) — an urban maternal metaphor that continues to inform my spatial sensibility.“ JH
Formats:
(2012) Urban Backstages, in context of Emotionale Passagen 2012; video installation with intervention live
Photos in WUK, courtesy of the artist
(2012) Urban Backstages, in context of Emotionale Passagen 2012; video installation with intervention live
(2002) Pregnant Buildings, in context of the featured “Landscapes” as part of the exhibition X-POSITION BA in Wien, Semper Depot Vienna, and in Rotter- dam, at the Berlage Gallery of the Berlage Institute
Photos in Semper Depot by Roman Vogl
EDIFICIOS EMBARAZADOS
1998–2012
Flipping Formats, Dérive Photography, Screening, Multimedia Installation and Performance
This photographic series originated from a dérive through five blocks and squares around Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, undertaken in 1998 together with Galatea Temerlin and Carolina Van der Meulen. Inspired by the psychogeographic practices of the Situationist International, the project sought to register the latent poetics of an urban fabric in flux—its ephemeral “clothing” of scaffolding, textile coverings, and surface transitions. The buildings, wrapped or “dressed” for renovation, appeared as uncanny bodies: pregnant with change, suspended between exposure and concealment.
In 2002, selected images from Edificios Embarazados were featured in the Landscapes screening of the exhibition X- Position BA at Semper Depot, Vienna, and later at the Berlage Gallery of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. This early international reception affirmed the project’s resonance with questions of spatial transformation and transitional aesthetics in architecture and visual culture. In 2012, the work shifted format within the collaborative project Urban Backstages, presented as a video installation with live performance during Emotionale Passagen, produced by Ivana Reyero and myself under the umbrella of Großes Schiff. The installation reanimated the original photographic material through subtle motion, heartbeat soundscapes, and textile envelopes—bringing the “pregnant” buildings to life once more, this time as an immersive, audio-visual experience. A live rhythmic intervention by Reyero further extended the work into performance, gesturing toward the hidden labor of the city—its backstages, production zones, and cycles of transformation obscured behind provisional façades.
“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 located in what is oriented by the obvious and secret necessity of revolution.”
—Guy-Ernest Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 6 “Spectacular Time”
Pregnant Buildings, 1998