Guillermo Santoma
The Barcelona-based designer investigates the process of deformation and creation through architecture, art and performance.
Cyrus Goberville: Could you tell me a little about what you do?
Guillermo Santomà: In general, my work is related to something between architecture, design, and art. So everything is connected, and I like to produce my own stuff, so, at the end, I'm thinking that I am trying to be a constructor.
CG: What’s your background?
GS: I'm from Barcelona. I studied industrial engineering and afterwards architecture. Engineering was more related to the product and process of production, but small things. And after I did architecture and that's why I started to construct things more related to houses, buildings—ways of life. Everybody can construct or can change the way he lives, by changing the objects that—
CG: That are around us.
GS: Yeah. I like this kind of architecture that completely changes the context. Buildings like Espace Niemeyer—these curved floorings and all these ceilings with the windows. It reminds me to create for a landscape more than for a building. I mean, Niemeyer was one of the best architects in the 20th century. And he also was a designer. Because these chairs and these tables are from Niemeyer.
CG: Yeah, like with you, because your work lies in between both practices. And also art?
GS: Yes. Performance and artworks.
CG: Do you refer to this as a proper artwork that could live in a museum or is it something that is more like utilitarian?
GS: I think both, because, at the end, the people can use the pieces however they want. That’s the nice thing about using objects—you can change the meaning of things. I'm interested in this idea when I design a chair or I design a house. Maybe later you don't use it as a chair, but you continue saying that it's a chair or lamp or solar panels or a computer. You can bring in this idea, whatever you want.
CG: And when you talk about performances, do you activate your own structures?
GS: We activate our own structures and also we construct live.
CG: And the piece you made here? Could you tell us a bit about it? Did you envision that it was in this very particular space and so you wanted to do something in relationship to it?
GS: Yeah. When I saw the pictures of the green carpet, I begin to imagine that this part of the building is more related to the public space. It's like an underground square. That's why we tried to make something that it looks like it's in the outside. That's why we included the solar panels—they are trying to take the light from the skylight. That was the main idea, to create something that is related to the landscape and to the shapes from the flooring. And we create this new technique: a topography made with sand, resins, and latex. It's also connected to the computer and the computer to the solar light, and it's kind of a cycle—
CG: It’s an autonomic system.
GS: Yeah. It's an autonomic system in the middle of this crazy landscape that at the end also looks like a sci-fi movie.
CG: Sci-fi, right. It reminds me of Philippe Parreno, a French artist who has also been working with systems, but here you have a more architectural approach. Do you envision to do more with autonomy in architecture?
GS: Yeah, I like the autonomy because at the end it's like self-construction, no? The world also works as a self-construction of itself. The sun is a performance every day, and the plants can take the energy from the sun, and it completes the cycle.
CG: Yeah, totally. But here you choose a place with limited natural light.
GS: Yeah, but I can bring it outside later. The piece doesn't finish when the show ends.
CG: Does it happen a lot for you to start with one piece as a first chapter, and then it gets to some—
GS: Yeah. It always happens that you begin to connect new ideas after a piece, because while touching the material and touching the new concepts, new places, you begin to construct another fiction. And this fiction, it's something that you have to complete from different angles and different approaches. It has to be this super rich process where everything mixes with everything and there are no borders between anything: nature, artificial, signs, gaming. Everything is connected and we have to show these ideas.
CG: With these systems that you create relating natural elements with the solar panels, do you think political environmental issues are something that you could connect to your work?
GS: You can, of course, but the relation between politics and art or any discipline, in the end it’s about each person. I think it can act as a virus also. It’s something that you learn from somebody and after you can spread, and I think that's the most interesting thing, when everybody is learning from the others.
CG: What are your next projects?
GS: I’m working in a house in Florence and a house in Madrid—a super nice house from the seventies, which we are renovating, taking out all the things that are not strictly structural and making it super light.
CG: What is the place in terms of architecture that you want to visit and never have?
GS: The ziggurats in Iran, and ancient Mesopotamian architecture.