Radius Episode 57: Giants Are Sleeping (00:00*) by Amanda Gutiérrez :: Installation and Broadcast from Comfort Station, Logan Square, Chicago :: November 29, 2014, 7:00 – 10:00 pm (CST).

Giants Are Sleeping aims to reflect the identity, transformation, and ownership of one Chicago electrical substation. Exploring the relationship between human memory and architecture, the installation pairs an interview with Kenneth Corrigan, a bookseller who inhabited the abandoned electrical substation in 1984, with a charcoal animation that uses substation photo archives as its main reference. Drawing techniques are the vehicle to convey symbolic connections that link the historical aspects of these buildings, while the radio becomes the narrative’s voice over.

Electrical substations can be seen as living organisms now fossilized by new technologies. Nevertheless, historically they represented a step forward in modernity’s achievement of energy equality for working class citizens. Their development and configuration generated questions concerning the role that electric light and power could have in transforming society. These substations became a familiar landmark in the neighborhood, though hidden and deceptive, not inhabited by humans.

Nowadays, these electrical substations function as shells that hide and protect the complex mechanisms that generate and transmit the grid. These locations are turning into historical artifacts, lost in time and the urban network. Neutral and almost invisible, these buildings replaced neighborhood electric plants as the city’s primary architectonic construction that controlled the distribution of electric power to consumers.

Using electricity as a generative medium, the Comfort Station building will serve as the space to frame architecture’s capabilities of sheltering and creating habitable structures.

Born in Mexico City, Amanda Gutiérrez completed her graduate studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, specializing in Performance and New Media. In Mexico, she completed her undergraduate studies in Stage Design at the INBA/ENAT.

For twelve years, she has worked in the field of performance and sound art, fusing the two disciplines in installation projects. Among the video series she has made: “A brief history of fictions,” which consists of four projects performed under the same methodology and work strategies from documentary and performance. This series has won two awards: The Fellowship Competition 2007 and CAAP 2008, and was selected as a finalist for the national award Artadia Art Chicago 2009.

Gutiérrez has had artist residencies at CMM (Multimedia Center) (2001), ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe, Germany (2002), and Artist Village in Taipei, Taiwan (2009). She has also received scholarships from the Artist Residencies Program 2009 FONCA-BANFF Centre and the prize-EMARE EMAN at the residency FACT Liverpool.

Notes:

Radius Episode 57 will be installed and broadcast live at Chicago’s Logan Square Comfort Station – a multidisciplinary art space located in a historic building that originally served as shelter for railroad travelers in the early 1900’s – on November 29 at 7pm – 10pm CST.

Episode 57 is the fourth episode of GRIDS. GRIDS is a four-part series of radio broadcasts at four electrical production or distribution centers in Chicago that examines energy propagation and distribution.

* Proceeding the event, a live audio recording will be released online at theradius.us/epsiode57.