Carlos Suárez. “Cities on the World”.

Shoring up the space in order to shore up an equally precarious reality: from this symbolic gesture of a provisional structure, which sometimes becomes permanent, Carlos Suárez undertakes a project that has more to do with the trickery and falsehood in the construction of the city and with becoming aware of common places than with bubbles and economic speculation.

The development and reconstruction of our everyday surroundings have been carried out as a mere tourist façade in which citizens are part of the set, more as consumer-users than as inhabitants and an essential part of it.

Behind the urban image lies the great lie of false foundations on which the fabric is supposed to rest.

Papier-mâché shop windows and double façades that hide decay and the real conditions of habitability, panoramic views prepared to recreate an image of tourist souvenirs, forgetting that the sediment of memory solidifies within those who built it.

Carlos Suárez shores up the idea and hits the mark of the torpor in which political leaders seek to bury critical thought, selling us an ever stranger and less recognisable virtuality. Halfway between the film set — recyclable, reusable and interchangeable — Las Vegas as an icon, and the theatre in which everyone is expected to play their part as an extra, so that the fictitious show may go on.

A phenomenon repeated anywhere in the world: Lisbon, London or, closer to home, Avilés. Urban recipes are transferable, simple solutions devised in large architecture and planning corporations that apply their ideas regardless of location and past, like the itinerant builders of other eras, at a moment when the world is globalising, making surroundings and the outlines of centres and peripheries unrecognisable.

Ajimez arte. February 2013