Sundried
Educational project developed by LA ESCUELA___ as part of the exhibition Future Schools at the National Academy of Design, led by architect, artist, and educator Oscar M. Caballero and the transdisciplinary collective Ensayos Urbanos, with the participation of architecture students of the Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo at the Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Secado Al Sol (Sundried) Minimal architectures for tomorrow is a participatory installation that reimagines ancestral Latin American drying racks, once used to cure meat, hides, and fibers, as ritual infrastructures of transformation and shared knowledge. The installation functions both as a classroom, a laboratory, and an archival site of ancestral knowledge, where materials and stories circulate freely. The installation becomes a potentially mobile device that can interact with the gallery space through different gestures. In so doing, it extends the classroom into an ephemeral architecture of care and transformation, reclaiming public space as a field for collective experimentation and imagining architecture as a living process rather than a finished object.
WORKSHOP + PERFORMANCE
The first session begins with a performative activation led by Lolo Ostia and a bioplastics workshop. A group of invited participants—artists, students, and educators who have engaged with biomaterials in different capacities—will be asked to bring a small piece of bio-art as an offering to the installation. In the Classroom space, they will write short recipes, processes, or stories related to their pieces on slips of paper, contributing to the project’s growing archive of knowledge. Following Lolo Ostia’s performance, participants will collectively hang these materials on the structure, initiating the installation as a suspended archive before the hands-on bioplastics workshop begins.
The installation is intended to be activated simultaneously in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and New York, USA. As sister structures, they will form a portal between the two cities, creating a dialogue that unfolds across climates, contexts, and distances. Through coordinated workshops and performances activated in both places, the installation becomes a shared platform for exchange, experimentation, and collective learning across borders.
