Virgencica, Virgencica!

María García Ruíz


La Virgencica was an experimental settlement built to house the displaced populations after the flooding of the Sacromonte caves in Granada in 1963. The architects designed a futuristic-looking system that was intended to represent a modern interpretation of a Grenadian cave. The neighborhood was thus a kind of lobby to the modernity that the high-rise blocks of apartments in the housing estates would bring.

This work is based on a re-reading of that process, recreating not the Virgin, but the memory of the Virgin. The volume of one of the modules is thus invoked with the memory of the Rodríguez-Amador family, a laboratory memory, or the laboratory of a memory that, together with the Torreón Arquitectura team and other collaborators, was carried out in the form of a party, a ritual, from construction to demolition, from appearance to disappearance, like a living image, with the mechanics of the Holy Week processions or like Ant Farm in "The eternal frame".

The project follows a path in the opposite direction to the one mentioned by Guy Debord in "The Society of the Spectacle": if everything directly experienced has become a representation, to make representation something directly experienced.

Technical datasheet

  • Title: Virgencica, Virgencica!
  • Direction: María García Ruíz
  • Production: 2016.
  • Duration: 00:12:00
  • Languages: Spanish
  • Formats: HD 1920x1080