Research Project
Year: 2024
Installation Design:
Luca Caiaffa
Photographs:
Luca Caiaffa
Sebastian Milla
MAGICAL-REAL TABLE
Architectural Installation
Held at the Left Bank laneway, Cuba Street quarter, Wellington 01 June, 2024
Magical-Real Table sought to capture magical-real presences, through performative, affective cartography. The project drew insights from the magical realist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude to explore performative cartographic strategies able to invite magical-real, subjective, and affective presences into existence. For that, the installation built upon a key narrative component of the novel, the Buendía family’s dining table, as a temporal fulcrum. In One Hundred Years of Solitude the dining table is a narrative figure that witnesses one hundred years of experiences across generations and perspectives. The Magical-Real Table combined the magical-real, temporal intensity of the Buendía’s dining table with the immediacy of life in a public urban space to extend the agency of magical-real presences within performative cartographic strategies in a spatial urban intervention.The pedestrian laneway, which links Cuba Street with Victoria Street, was chosen to host the table due to its multiple spatial and cultural layers that create links with the story of OHYS. The long and narrow, open, public space is formed by a dynamic sequence of complex building forms (including a used book store and a local café with outdoor tables), voids, programs, canopies, and small gardens that create a dynamic and culturally rich urban landscape.
The installation combines cartographic fragments—transcribed from the novel, recorded from the Left Bank, or enacted by new encounters onsite—that traced multiple temporalities from One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Left Bank laneway, and the installation event. The project foregrounds two key intersections between magical realism and architectural mapping. First, the novel’s temporal convergence informs a mapping approach where multiple presences and their durations act simultaneously, expanding spatial significations as assemblages of temporal relations. Second, the novel’s blending of magical and real elements suggests a mapping approach that incorporates what is physically present with what is virtually evoked. In this sense, the Magical-Real Table operates with simultaneous temporalities—a performative mode of drawings through which the virtual dimensions of space and its multiple temporalities linger alongside actual contexts.
Rather than representing fixed states, Magical-Real Table simultaneously maps what is seen, remembered, felt, and in a state of becoming. Its cartographic readings are fleeting and emergent within the duration of the event—registered in photographs, reflections, presences, and spatial interactions. By using García Márquez’s narrative as a conceptual lens, this project proposes ways of siting and sighting multiple temporalities as a cartographic strategy to destabilise representational fixity in spatial mapping, opening it up to temporal multiplicities, affects, and magical-real presences in architectural understandings of space.
︎magical.realist.cartographies
