"Dysfunctional Landmarks" is a work involved in an ironic and violent regard over architecture, function and representation, over flesh and its scale. Facing the legion of abstract, dematerialized and visually "low-fi" concepts shaping the global architectural discourse of our days, this project proposes, as opposite, a disturbing "high-definition" shift in the way we can conceive the generic in architecture. In this work, visualization technologies are used as a magnification lens to show existing but hidden aberrant possibilities, that are consequence of realizing architectural global nigthmares. I would like to think about my work as inmersed in a kind of “empirical surrealism”.

 

"Emilio López-Galiacho´s “Dysfunctional Landmarks” proposes an architecture of antimodularity. As globalization brings about a crisis in identitarian representation, many architects have sought to build formulaic languages to author space in an economic form. López-Galiacho´s work subverts these formulas by converting them into perverted generators of cross- pollinated landscapes. It is not a coincidence that computer graphics achieved an uncanny realism in the representation of synthetic humans exactly at the same timeas flocking algorithms were implemented in video games. “Dysfunctional Landmarks” invites us to visit the scene this dire coincidence. A place of hyper-analysis without synthesis that underlines the virtual violence behind the generic."

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

 

"Emilio López-Galiacho's images are very precise and visceral at the same time. They are an interesting encounter between the flesh and the architectonic, with nothing of the B-horror movie gross-out aesthetic that work exploring that intersection tends to get seduced by."

Brian Massumi