A MOUNTAIN IN REAL TIME: The Architecture of the Iliggocene

To reach this mountain, you go through a suburb and two universities. On the main street of the housing development, there is a river on the right. You cross it, and you see a gate in the fence. You go in. You are in a forest; it is tall, the trees are about 20 meters high.

This mountain stares at you with a compendium of architectural behaviors.

Anthill.

Paying attention to what this abandoned territory tells us is crucial. Creating this drawing as an architect is an act of dissent against the dominant currents in both the market an architectural education. The interspecies architecture of this mountain reveals alternative paths.

This mountain is a reservoir of water.

This pile of debris establishes a relationship with your body. I give the name “somatic agent” to any entity that connects with us in a way that is not primarily based on language or rational logic, but through other markers and modes of communication that are not related to an established system of signs.

As a result of prolonged abandonment, this mountain harbors rare plant species.

This act, this drawing, requires a slow contemplative time – one that does not respond to the productivity of the finished object, but to the time it needs in order to become reflection, not result.

At present, a citizens’ movement is defending this territory—whose edges have now become a forest—from the construction of 1,050 luxury housing units

You can feel here the transformation of matter so closely that it is as if you were inside the water.

Thermal inertia.

This mound of debris holds the memory of its demolition, yet it transforms that violence by bringing together heterogeneous elements to create a new construct where the inorganic and the organic evolve together as ecosystem.

Write down the time you have spent looking at me.

This is an infinite drawing; you are only seeing one of its moments. The next time it is printed, it will capture a different one.

Accumulating and composting matter.

If you want to hear the vibrant matter of this mountain, place your hands over your ears and press firmly.

Filtration.

Spider webs.

This mountain stares at you with a compendium of times.

In the northern part of the complex there is another forest. It is made up of holm oaks. It is very dense and very low, and there is no light inside. You have to crouch down to move through it. It feels like a fairy-tale forest.

This is a drawing that speaks about attention.

Air exchange.

Burrow.

What you are looking at is a drawing of times: hours of drawing, the times of the mountain, the times of degradation and transformation of materials, the times of growth, and the life-and-death cycles of living organisms.

This mountain stares at you with a compendium of organisms.

Every mountain has a past. This one was, more than a century ago, a military powder magazine. It was built in 1912 in Spain. The site played a fundamental role during the Civil War of 1936.

This “somatic agent” establishes body-to-body communication, revealing more about its way of being through embodied, metabolic, sensual contact.

This mountain stares at you.

The qualities of this mountain bring us to the architecture of the Iliggocene, which requires, above all, a shift in attitude at its very root. That architecture seeks to learn from this mountain of debris – from its past, its present, and its future.

This hill is full of microclimates – diverse habitats that would not exist otherwise. There is a wild pear tree over there, on the opposite side. It is unusual for it to grow in a place like this; maybe there are pockets of water we cannot see.

Resilience.

This mountain is a manifesto.

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A Mountain in Real Time: The Architecture of the Iliggocene is a work composed of a 4‑hour‑24‑minute video installation and a large‑format digital hand drawing (77.6 × 408.4 cm)

The piece reflects on the vast amount of debris produced in our era, while the annotations that accompany the drawing reveal the multiple natures of these residues and the way a building gathers within itself diverse components, toxicities, and potentialities. At the same time, both the drawing and the video monitor a rubble mound abandoned for more than twenty years. This mountain, with a military past, now reorganizes its own matter, generating new forms and possibilities. In this sense, the work invites us to pay attention to how the mountain “thinks,” forging alliances between organic and inorganic matter and their dynamics. The mountain also acts as a somatic agent, calling our bodies to identify with it from within. The work carries a strong in‑situ experiential potential through the instructions it provides.

The whole piece will be part of the exhibition Iliggocene: The age of Dizziness that will be celebrated at Kindl Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin. The exhibition is curated by Ruth Anderwald, Sergio Edelsztein and Leonhard Grond. Opening days: From March the 20th to March the 22nd. You will be able to visit it till July the 26th (2026)