Boom (n): onomatopoeia describing the hollow sound of an explosion or a heartbeat.

Box (n):  a generic container

The Storming of  Arts_Santa_Monica Foundation

This scenographic installation inserts itself in the continuity of the 2010 “No limits in the streets” project  in Moscow, while the EME3 International Architecture Festival

Boombox is an in situ contextual installation.  An explosion of the Art Center, it transforms the existing architecture in order to change the perception and experience of the site.

The approach proposes a rediscovery of the XXIst century magolopolis through a superposition of architectures. The city builds upon itself, building on the land and the existing built heritage, within its porosities and on its appendages.

The basic module of this installation is the cardboard box. Appropriated from its original use, it nevertheless retains the symbol of an ordinary container for the nomad.

This urban scenography plays on the dichotomy of elements; it’s a eulogy to cardboard, a cheap material symbolizing nomadism, contrasted against stone, a noble material representing longevity in all its static weight. Although separate entities, there is nevertheless an exchange between two bodies, a cultural and social fusion between the academic and the contemporary, at the crossroads between a work of art and a work of architecture.

The invasion of a humble material at Arts_Santa_Monica  carries with it the debate about art in public spaces within the city, in an open, democratic and accessible form.

It generates immediate, accessible experiences, highlighting the architectural metamorphosis; thewalls are no longer an end in and of itself but a blank page on which other interventions can write, becoming layered and saturated like graffiti on a wall.

BoomBox, evidently the explosion of a box, is the fragmentation of the building itself but also a critique of standardized architecture, a re-transcription of the over-densification of cities and their borders, pushed to its paroxysm.

The facade undergoes mutation through the saturation of a system that attaches and grows like a favela on a hill.

The limits

Ground, walls and ceilings dissolve their own limits through proliferation of cardboard boxes. Gravity laws does not participate into the whole system any longer. Tridimensionnal system of reference fades away.

Time is suspended; X is the moment of an urban explosion that brings with it the mute cry of the people, of the streets, of our cities.

This spatio-temporal disorientation creates a new relationship with space, where the spectator/citizen observes the super-densification of the city block by block, simultaneously experiencing a global vision of a fractured monolith.

Links to  Arts_Santa_Monica