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"La barca de barro" 
  La barca de barro
(The Ship of Clay)
Víctor Vázquez
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Competition Guidelines

Great Window to the Sea Square, Condado

After turning our backs for decades on the seacoast as a monumental public space, this grand view gives us the opportunity to project our civic aspiration in the setting of the surrounding sea. Urban in character and beach-loving at heart, the view will be the new center of Condado. The event deserves a striking and monumental work, which acknowledges, nevertheless, that monuments belong to the people. The proposal must be coordinated with the project of the square, presently at the design and planning stage. Three works are requested for this square: a big-format one (35 ft. x 40ft.), a middle-sized one, and a small-scale one.
About the Area
Due to our geographical location, the seacoast is a favorite place for constructing identity symbols in the discourse of popular culture and tourism advertising campaigns. Beyond the stereotypes to which it is usually reduced, we perceive in the seacoast the possibility of alternating between the personal scale and vast panoramas, between the known and the unknown, between objective and abstract landscape. There is a captive audience that worships this setting as the ideal space for leisure and meditation.
Aphorism

Technical description:
8 ft. x 8 ft.

"...the ship is a floating piece of space; a space of nowhere, with a life of its own, self-enclosed and roaming the infinite sea.... from port to port, from shore to shore, from brothel to brothel, ships travel to the colonies in search of the most precious secrets of their gardens... Understandably, ships have been for our civilization, from the XVI century to the present, not only, of course, the main instruments of economic development, but also the main reserve of the imagination. [...] In civilizations without ships, dreams dry up, espionage replaces adventure, and policemen displace pirates."
(Michel Foucault)

"An island is, always, the likelihood of a ship..."
(Edwin Reyes)

To stay or not to stay: that is the question. To speak about ships is to speak about travel; to evoke, spaces that are possible only in the imagination or in memory from a transient here and now; to travel over the mysterious immensity of water, always the same and always different. In La barca de barro ( The Ship of Clay ) the ship and the water are artifacts fused by distance in a ritual of mutual penetration, of mutual production. The observer participates in the paradox of traveling without moving, of going back to the origin by filtering his/her gaze through the clay skeleton of a ship anchored on   stones. An immobile ship, anchored, wrecked, that reawakens our memories, like the wave returning to the coast, or like the ship that takes us back to the ontological rite of being.
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