Virgencica, Virgencica!

María García Ruíz


The Virgencica was an experimental settlement built to accommodate the populations displaced after the floods in the caves of Sacromonte in Granada in 1963. The architects designed a prefabricated system with a futuristic look that aimed to be a modern interpretation of the cave. Thus, the neighborhood became a kind of antechamber to the modernity that the high-rise apartment blocks in housing developments would represent.

This work is based on a rereading of that process, recreating not the Virgencica itself, but the memory of the Virgencica. Thus, the volume of one of the modules is evoked 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, as a living image, with the mechanics of the Holy Week processions or like Ant Farm in The eternal frame.

The project takes a path in the opposite direction to that mentioned by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle: if everything directly experienced has become a representation, making the representation something directly experienced.

Technical datasheet

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