The Biggest Living Room in the Netherlands - Javier Montoro

This piece aims to bring out the ruin-value of Van Klingeren’s Karregat and the enclosed meanings within its central pillar structure, interpreted as both a symbol and a material residue of failed social utopian ideals of modernity. Its birth in the 1970’s was a result of a widespread frenzy of urban planning and social experimentation which spurred the flourishing of innovative, unifying interior ‘architectural landscapes’. These however never succeeded in full filling their conceivers’ philanthropic dream of community regeneration, thus rendering the building into a living ruin where both the zealous optimism of post-war urban planning and the postmodern disenchantment with grand narratives of progress converge.

The sculptures aim to inhabit this liminal area, seen as half-organic, half-industrial artifacts whose utility seems to have been rendered meaningless by time, sunken into a state of futility caustically set by the bold, appealing colors of the tiled surface. They aim to complete, along with the Klingerenian umbrella-like structure, an imaginary landscape in which past and present crystallise together in a sort of post-industrial phantasmagoria.