Pedro: New statements

PREFACE
I really think a lot about architecture.

INTRODUCTION
Somewhere recently I read about Christopher Nolan's work and the role the characters in his movies play. According to the analysis, which I thought to be correct, Nolan's interest throughout his career hasn't been people, but ideas. Memento, The Prestige, Batman Begins, Inception, Interstellar... these movies are not really about the characters and the things attached to them but about more abstract ideas and their logical expression. Nolan's films have some kind of Bauhaus aesthetic (with some obvious awkward instances of sentimentality to be sure).
Ideas, not people.

CHAPTER I
After thinking about this review of Nolan's approach to film, I realize that really what I'm after in my artistic work is ideas as well--particularly within the so called "realm of architecture." I sense that the intervention of people into my work feels either forced, or completely displaces the central theme of architecture from the piece.
What's more, people are interested in people. Somehow a photograph with people, or a painting of someone has this advantage over abstract and dehumanized (as in no humans literally represented) works.
However, the more I think about it, the more I am confident that people in and of themselves are not what interest me. I increasingly see my work as an expression of enjoying the material world that surrounds us: the way things are put together, organized, seemingly placed at random, the work of light and shadow that makes possible texture, depth, and color. I am not interested in a depopulated world. People after all create the space and the world. I am interested in those moments and spaces where/when people leave the material world to itself, after or before transforming it. I like the potential of peoples returning to that place or to that time. I am interested in a kind of visual, cross-disciplinary (history, art history, philosophy, media studies) archeology of the present, as well as the past and even the future. What kinds of ideas, feelings and actions happen when humans walk out of the frame? What can we learn from materiality, and from my particular interest, architecture, and the built environment?

CONCLUSION
Besides this renewed configuration of my artist statement, I also reinforced my commitment to the very specific audience which I have in mind: the global architecture community (think architecture-themed tumblers, blogs and magazines) whose main endeavor lies among the same line of pure materiality as a source of inspiration.

NOTES
I don't think I am being a misanthrope however. My deepest and most honest thought is that humans can in fact change the physical world in very positive ways. But they first have to be committed to this change, and above all, be convinced that change is possible and happens unnoticed on a daily basis. The major changes needed for the construction of a better world cannot be fostered through an indifference towards the material. It is up to us whether we decide to live in a world that consumes us, or a world that we consume, or even better, produce.