Artissima: Linear time is a western invention

Linear Time Is a Western Invention introduces a dialogue between Lucas Simões’s (São Paulo, 1980) Dormentes and Ignacio Unrrein’s (Buenos Aires, 1987) Tapiar Buenos Aires, bringing the two projects together through the notion of potentiality and its suspension within architectural space. In the background lie the transformations of Latin American metropolises, where cycles of construction, demolition, and reconstruction continually erase material traces and collective memories. The project questions a linear conception of time, oriented towards a future that replaces and supersedes the past. In the cities of São Paulo and Buenos Aires, this idea of progress coexists with forms of persistence and interruption: abandoned buildings, walled-up façades, and unfinished structures bear witness to overlapping temporalities, in which what has been declared obsolete continues to exert a physical and symbolic presence. Both artists intervene in the fundamental elements of architecture - beams, walls, columns, bricks - stripping them of their original functions. Through deformation and suspension, matter takes on unexpected behaviours, challenging the relationship between form, function, and purpose. In Dormentes, Simões transforms structural elements into organic, almost anthropomorphic bodies: beams that bend, structures that curve, forms that seem to surrender to gravity without ever collapsing. Steel, traditionally associated with rigidity and resistance, reveals an unexpected vulnerability. These structures are also moulds, potentially intended to receive concrete, yet the production process is halted before its completion. The emptiness of the moulds thus becomes a form in potential, the space of something that might still occur. The sleep evoked by the title does not coincide with inactivity, but with a state of latency, a suspension of action that preserves the possibility of transformation. In Unrrein’s works, by contrast, the body emerges through obstruction and deviation. The project Tapiar Buenos Aires originates from the observation of bricked-up openings in abandoned buildings across the Argentine capital. The act of sealing doors and windows, preventing access to unused spaces, reveals the contradictions of an urban system in which private property takes precedence over the need for housing. Exposed brick, a recurring material in informal Latin American architecture, thus becomes an instrument of exclusion, while retaining the memory of building practices associated with survival and self-construction. In Unrrein’s sculptures, however, the wall loses its rigidity: it curves, becomes lighter, and takes on the apparent consistency of suspended fabric. An element conceived to separate and delimit becomes an unstable body, questioning its own material and symbolic weight. The dialogue between the two practices unfolds through two forms of acrobatics: on the one hand, the suspension of action (Simões); on the other, the suspension of function (Unrrein). In the first, the body holds back what might happen; in the second, an action already completed is rendered unstable, almost reversible. The curved line, shared by both artists, becomes a gesture of resistance against the rigidity of rationalist design, introducing the possibility of deviation from a predetermined order. This condition recalls a conception of Latin American architecture as a living organism, open to transformation and collective practices. In the work of Lina Bo Bardi, architecture is neither autonomous nor definitive, but a space continually redefined through use, improvisation, and everyday life. This perspective finds a meaningful resonance in the practices of Simões and Unrrein, where precariousness represents not merely a condition of fragility, but also a possibility for adaptation and resistance. In both cases, architecture becomes an acrobatic body inhabiting a state of disequilibrium, departing from the function for which it was conceived. The empty moulds of Dormentes and the sealed walls of Tapiar Buenos Aires emerge as complementary gestures: one holds back what might happen, while the other interrupts what is expected to continue. Time, like matter, thus ceases to move in a straight line: it bends, pauses, and returns. Rather than proposing the overcoming of the past in the name of the future, these works evoke a suspended temporality in which memory and possibility coexist, and what appears unfinished or inactive retains the capacity for transformation.