Desde la periferia is an audiovisual project directed by José Luis Uribe, PhD in architecture and professor at the School of Architecture of the University of Talca, Chile. The project consists of three documentaries to be released progressively over the next two years, exploring various aspects associated with contemporary Latin American architecture. The first installment, Volume I: Ugly, Dirty & Bad: A Contemporary Architecture in Latin America, is an audiovisual essay that gathers some of the initial thoughts on its current state through the oral accounts of a group of architects in a hotel room in Asunción, Paraguay.
In this regard, the film features three Spanish architects who have served as architecture magazine editors and helped bring visibility to this contemporary movement from Europe: Arturo Franco (former editor of Revista COAM and editor of RITA magazine), Carlos Quintáns, and Carlos Pita (former editors of Obradoiro magazine). This is complemented by testimonies from architects Sandra Barclay (Peru), Nicolás Campodónico (Argentina), Javier Corvalán (Paraguay), Jean Pierre Crousse (Peru), José Cubilla (Paraguay), Daniel Moreno Flores (Ecuador), Mauricio Rocha (Mexico), José María Sáez (Spain), Fernando Viegas (Brazil), critic Anatxu Zabalbeascoa (Spain), and a special appearance by Jorge Scrimaglio (Argentina).
“The idea was to document the living testimony of a highly diverse group of Latin American architects, whose design and construction processes nevertheless share certain common aspects, such as inventiveness in the face of budgetary constraints, the valorization of regional materials, the development of an architecture without a skin, or works based on the stereotomics of materials and structural tectonics. In that sense, it is a film that addresses the discursive dimension and distances itself from the aesthetic construction of this architecture, as the viewer will not see houses or buildings,” says José Luis Uribe.
