Dream of House

The sculptures I create appear unfinished because they materialize the percentage of an apartment I could purchase with twenty years of my life—the time it would take me to repay a mortgage. My 3D images show fragments of walls that are then built at a 1:1 scale as site-specific interventions. These sculptures reproduce the designs and materials of new apartments being built nearby, in neighborhoods where rapidly rising real-estate prices displace people like me who cannot afford them. They function as anti-readymades: rather than bringing the everyday into the white cube, the white cube moves out into everyday life.

These sculptures work as site-specific interventions. They are fragments of apartments located in areas where prices are skyrocketing. They represent the percentage that I would be able to purchase if I got a 20-year mortgage loan. Rather than representing the debt, they materialize the time of my life I would spend trying to pay for it. Their design and materials are the same as the ones used in the newly built condos in their vicinity.

Creating these sculptures led me to explore a parallel between architectural renderings and desires: both are projections waiting to become real at some point in the future. Through this project, I also began working with moving images and the game engines used to produce the visuals and virtual worlds of architectural animations.

The value of my time changes across different parts of the city. Here I built a column representing twenty years of my life if I were to purchase property in the wealthy Jardines del Pedregal neighborhood. I then moved it to the adjacent working-class neighborhood of Pedregal de Santo Domingo, where it remained for twelve months. This is the neighborhood where I grew up and where housing prices are also rising.

20 years of my life are worth 4.5 m2 of an apartment located in Santa Fe, one of the most luxurious neighborhoods in Mexico City. This sculpture represents that value and is located on land owned by the Cooperativa de Vivienda Palo Alto—one of the oldest housing cooperatives in Mexico. The Cooperativa has used its organization to prevent being displaced by real estate development.