MAGICAL-REAL COURTYARD
Speculative Architectural Drawing Exhibition
Held at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts from 03-19 March, 2023
The exhibition ‘Magical-Real Courtyard’ employs narrative-based curatorial strategies to (re)present the spatial and temporal structures of García Márquez’s novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ within a gallery space. The exhibition encompasses a large traversable cartography scaled to fit the ground floor of the LightSpace Gallery at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts. This cartography, titled ‘The River Inside the Patio’ (above), combines the nine previously mapped settings of the novel within a single drawing. The layered, cartographic surface coalesces the novel’s territory both spatially and temporally, encompassing the multiple times, scales, events, and characters.
At the ground floor of the gallery space, the drawing merges the novel’s territory and the gallery space, becoming a curatorial device that situates the other nine cartographies within the space. The exhibition invites visitors to traverse through this walkable drawing, engaging with the novel’s shifting perspectives on time, space, and reality. The aim is for the experience to create new readings of the magical-real cartographies—now entangled with spatial qualities such as light and reflectivity levels, contextual relationships, movements and trajectories of visitors, or shifting viewing angles, heights, scales, and orientations. The work in ‘Magical-Real Courtyard’ points to expanded ways in which drawing can engage with multiple, transformative, and diversified voices of place, bringing them together into magical-real representations.
︎magical.realist.cartographies
Research Project
Year: 2023
Exhibition Design:
BRAFFA
