Bricklayers
Bricklayers is an ongoing series of interactive 3D models made using a technique called Photogrammetry that captures old memories and passage of time. In this process I take hundreds of photographs from this everchanging space to create a render of each iteration before it changes again.
Those interactive files are available as NFTs on various platforms. (Foundation | OpenSea | Objkt)
"Every year during my childhood my first day of vacation from school had the same meaning, leaving everything behind on hold in Brazil where I lived, and returning to the country I was born in to meet my relatives and fit into their lives for a month or two.
A separate attraction was visiting my maternal grandmother in her little apartment in Punta del Este, a city which was deserted in winter and overcrowded in the summer season. Every time after she opened the door and gave me her grandmother's hug, I would be surprised by the same room, the same furniture and the same objects as always, collected throughout her life, kept through multiple house moves. And when I say multiple moves, I really mean multiple moves.
While my grandfather was alive, they moved more than forty times within Uruguay, living in suburban homes and in mezzanines above gas stations they managed. A habit that seems to have been acquired by my own parents as well.
Nevertheless, the Punta del Este apartment has remained the same for over 15 years. It was on the first floor overlooking the Av. Roosevelt bike path and the intersection with Av.Brasil. I've always found this location curious with so many meanings and coincidences behind the names of the avenues, but what I remember best was the daily mess that occurred at this intersection which had no traffic lights, offering daily near misses and angry horns that we would always get to watch from the apartment's balcony.
The balcony was just opposite the front door, between it and the door was the dining/living room, just off the hallway that gave access to the small windowless kitchen where, to my delight, she made her gnocchi or delicious apple pies, which no one was ever able to reproduce since there was no official recipe.
In that in between room is where the surprise and attraction that aroused my curiosity every year was at. Or rather, the surprise was not in the room, but the room itself.
Vacation after vacation, winter or summer, this room would present itself anew to me.
Same room, same furniture, and same objects as always, but everything different. The sofa would be where the TV was, the TV where the magazine rack used to be, the nested side tables and the half-open babushkas now spread among some other corners or new spaces created by the new arrangement of things.
Some iterations seemed to translate the mood of the moment. Christmas versions cherished the space for socializing and gathering of people, Winter versions emanated more introspective sensations, sometimes with the armchair aiming directly at the TV, sometimes looking for the light that came in from the balcony.
The nails in the walls could carry both black-and-white portraits and decorative plates from places she might not even have known herself. The blue biscuit tin box, which had long since stopped storing biscuits and now carried only sewing gear, never had a fixed place. And year in year out that was the only certainty I had, somehow my grandmother would move the entire room on its own as if nothing really was supposed to have a fixed place or definitive function.
Without meaning to, I ended up repeating this habit as did my parents before me. We have been carrying our furniture and junk from one house to another some twenty plus times at this point, from one neighborhood to another, this city to the next, within this country or the other.
We add some to the collection, transform others, paint walls, and change floors to accommodate them better, only to change everything again from time to time. I know from memory both the comfort and the weight of each item, I can accommodate them, move them, or stack them as if they were pieces of Tetris, without giving it too much thought.
Even without knowing for sure why, we are always changing and transforming our spaces. I never got to ask my grandma why she would do that, whether she had a bigger goal or whether she even thought about it. To me I guess that's just something we do.
In the middle of one of many days of renovation, with a taste of dust and a smell of paint, my parents and I reflected: we are albañiles."
