THIS BIG RED MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS

Is there anyone who imagines hell’s color to be light blue?

Albertine Stahl.

To truly appreciate architecture, it may even be necessary to commit a murder.

Bernard Tschumi, Advertisements for Architecture

A weapon with five edges, a beast with four heads, makes its cannibalism on certain architectures a critical act, a perfect act of architecture. This machine uses architecture itself, the "finished" building, as its working material. Moreover, it devours and savors its own kind. It turns the work of its author against him, tearing it from the realm of architecture to launch it into the realm of the arts: color becomes palpable, the echo of the everyday becomes sound that transgresses; from its iconoclastic character emerges political history, from the visual and clothing arts, irreverence. Killing fascists, like killing lovers of conservative art, is a joke taken very seriously. This Big Red machine, like a monstrous hydra, has more than one head: that of the artist Albertine Stahl, its original head; its sound heads, Microgarden Records and La Jauría, from which infernal noises never cease to emanate; and that of the designer Marco Garro, who shelters and dresses the bodies that emerge from this hell on a scale.

Two architectures in the center of San Jose are linked by this piece; the quintessential economic architecture: the house, the favorite object of current real estate speculation in San Jose; and the architecture where a large part of national politics has been confined: the Assembly; together they form the substance of a political economy. Visitor, the house on which it rests its feet - apparently common - is designed by the same architect as the creator of the concrete monolith that the Legislative Power of Costa Rica approved as its new building. This pseudo-brutalist legal machine, a master in the art of indifference, manufactures laws within its walls without the need to mediate with the outside, simply because it doesn't care. If the Big Red Machine alludes to the place where fascists meet their death - and resistance to their conservatism - this building, on the other hand, is the cradle of their birth and the proliferation of their offspring.

Like all formidable art, its mastery is based on technique. So, we are in a red tunnel. The five meters of stairs are altered with hypersensitive microphones that receive the vibration of metal and distort it, along with the lights of the place that dazzle the gaze. Through the ritual of the parade, (counter)exemplary bodies descend and ascend the stairs, activating the senses, like an auditory microscope of the scream trapped in the spaces of metal, like the beats of the building excited by the energy of steps that caress its body. At the end of the parade, the audience activates with their weight and touch the sound apparatus, and the Big Red Machine speaks, screams, and moans in its structure. Up, to the right, next to Stahl's studio, and to finish the journey of this immersion tank, a concentrated noise pushes the senses of the viewers to the limit.

Essentially, it is an expanded spatial painting. A living canvas that tears itself apart and recreates, a collage of forces and energies that ask the space what its own is. In silence, the painting is abandoned, like a concrete building, closed in on itself, not seen as a landscape. It is an imaginary painting that can be touched, seen, heard, and inhabited. Its slogan, by radically changing its architectural program (after all, in front of stairs, we are all accustomed to - mechanically - lifting one foot over the other), is to question how we inhabit the spaces we transit and for what purpose they are built.

Welcome to a pictorial nightmare, to a Big Red Machine that kills traditions.”

-Josseline Pinto and Carlos Aguilar.

March 18, 2023