By Francisco Guevara | Executive Director
Arquetopia launched an exciting summer with a program full of projects and activities, transforming a car into a bike, constructing a water purification island, challenging the local contemporary art production, and developing a new music project.
During the months of April and May, we hosted Martin Kaltwasser, Berlin-based artist, and with the help of 30 students fromUniversitario Bauhaus, he dismantled a 1985 Chrysler New Yorker to transform it into a bicycle cart. In the process, students not only learned basic engineering principles but also about urban development and the bike movement as an option for green transportation and social participation. The result was a clever and fun mobile sculpture that circulated through downtown Puebla raising questions about global warming, privatization of public space while promoting ideas of sustainability.
In June, we welcomed Jakub Szczesny, fun and highly energetic Warsaw based architect and artist. Together with a group of local engineers and entrepreneurs, Jakub developed a large-scale public art project consisting of a floating island powered by exercise machines that will purify the water of the San Baltazar Lagoon in Puebla. The island is an example to follow that creates environmental awareness from the perspective of individuals working together for a greater good, to contribute to water conservation. The project was extremely successful by adapting a previously designed art project to the local context by implementing local knowledge and using Mexican technology with the help and support of Neowattss, GASE, Inled, Ferrecepsa, and Tecnoplast Ecológico. The project is currently under construction and will be installed permanently this coming fall, so stay tuned!
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