Build and Design by Francisco Berlanga
Exploring the relationship between sound and architecture. This project takes the structure of the breezeblock, iconic to both Vancouver and Mexico City, and explores how instruments might inhabit the blocks. Metal rods and nails protrude from hand cast concrete, weaving through each other reminiscent of the designed facades of the blocks. Some block are strung with tensioned construction wires, strummed with metal stakes and paracord knot mallets. Exploring the material nature of the block all the materials within them must also be acquired at the hardware store. In this material restriction some exciting forms emerge such as a drum skin formed from flayed rubber painters gloves. Rebar bars pierce cement blocks as resonating poles, mounted with hammered steel amplifying horns, and hung with bent rebar and concrete chimes. The final assemblage of 6 hand made blocks stacked atop blocks reclaimed from Vancouver renos, resembles a miniature building in itself, a structural monument to the block as unlikely instruments. The blocks are activated by strikes from hammers and reworked construction waste mallets and amplified by a contact mic tied to my palm, the act of amplification becomes bodily as my hand must become grounded with the blocks to produce noise.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Francisco Berlanga is a Vancouver based textile artist whose practice reflects on his relationship to his Mexican identity as a second generation immigrant through the lens of Craft. He attempts to understand how one can inhabit a culture while being partially absent from it. He engages in discourse with his own identity through the creation of traditional Mexican “manualidades” or crafts. His practice engages with concepts of inaccessibility attempting to bridge the gaps between his personal and cultural identities by forcing connections between them and trying to understand the limitations that these identities impose upon each other. Histories of repetition often produce apparitions of motifs that haunt his works. His previous exhibitions include solo shows at Grunt gallery as well as group shows at the Morris and Helen Belkin gallery, Surrey Art gallery, the AHVA gallery, This gallery, and the Audain gallery. Berlanga obtained his BFA at Simon Fraser University and his MFA at the University of British Columbia.
Portfolio: https://franciscoberlanga.myportfolio.com/home
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/franciscoberlanga97
