Project details
Festival
LUZ Y VAN GUARDIAS
Location
City Hall, Salamanca, Spain
Category
2018, awarded work
Urban Tree
“In the ritual of repetition, we forget to ask if the cycle we follow is truly ours.”
The Urban Tree concept explores the disconnect between the natural world and the structured environments we live in. Our cities are designed based on scientific laws, reducing nature to controlled fragments, like animals confined in zoos. Life within the limits of comfort zones has become the norm.
The Enlightenment belief that human reason is universal and common sense leads to the same conclusions everywhere is challenged by today’s reality: ecological disasters that logic alone cannot resolve. This artwork reflects the aftermath of imposing rigid, geometric reasoning onto an irregular, organic world. It portrays this contrast by overlaying flat, two-dimensional characters on natural and urban three-dimensional elements.
The building is opened up to viewers, revealing the simple lives of low-resolution characters, controlled by just four keys—reminiscent of old computer games. Their internal world mirrors what is visible from the outside. The digital glitches and rapid scene changes symbolize the collision between reality and the city’s symbolic structures (like the City Hall), as the ordered mathematical comfort zones take on an artistic form.
In Urban Tree, vertical urban life becomes a ritual of repetition—a self-replication of individuals sharing the same roots. The artwork envisions life within a tree-like structure that blends natural forms with the mathematical principles of architecture.
Text by Cristian Cojanu