Yasmine and the Seven Faces of The Heptahedron
Convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d’O
Bergen Assembly, Bergen
8 September – 6 November 2022

How might ruins serve as a source of divination? Alvaro Urbano’s work explores the co-existence of progress, infrastructure, and collapse with The Great Ruins of Saturn (2021), showing how remnants of the past can be generative for our understanding of the future.

Urbano’s film and installation looks back to the 1964 New York World’s Fair in Queens. This international fair displayed an array of cultural, scientific, and corporate goods, as well as new architecture. Under the theme “Peace Through Understanding,” its 140 pavilions represented eighty nations, twenty-five US states, and more than forty-five corporations, which unveiled forward-thinking technologies, foods, cultural products, and the imagined desirable consumer items of the future.

Chaired by the infamous urban developer Robert Moses—known for his lust for power, racism, and poor ethics—the utopian, expansionist, and capitalist intentions of this fair jar with its physical ruins, the concrete columns and polychrome tiles of its Tent of Tomorrow now vestiges of yesterday.
Urbano takes an interest in the remains of temporary architecture, as constructed (and often left disused) for events such as global fairs. Staged at the Østre Skostredet 8, Urbano’s project changes the register of this futurist, techno-capitalist display by transforming it through a low-fi medium—the shadow puppet show. The New York State Pavilion (originally designed by Philip Johnson) is a leading character, alongside a pair of spectacles, a globe, theme park-style rides, dinosaurs, and microphones, interweaving festivity and excitement, projection and anxiety. Combining ancient and cutting-edge technologies, the event comes together as a site for uncertain projection onto a possible future.

Urbano’s project was initially presented in Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, in 2021. It locates the resemblances between infrastructures of utopian longing, and the potential of ruins as sites of renewed fantasy, storytelling as a generative device for divination. Exhibited in the context of the Fortune Teller, Urbano’s work shows how everything past was once in the future, and that exploring the future resembles an act of divination through anecdote, speculation, and storytelling.

Photos by Thor Brødreskift