Monday 29 August 2011

Rodrigo Derteano : Ciudad Nazca / Nazca City

This is great- an autonomous robot tracing the full scale outline of an imaginary city onto the Peruvian desert. Taking inspiration from the ancient Nazca lines of Peru, Rodrigo collaborated with architecture collective Supersudaca to design a street layout by collaging pieces from the ten largest cities of Latin America.

"By drawing a gigantic map of a city onto the desert, the project not only seeks to draw attention to this facts, but questions our very concept of city, specially in regards to its environment. Lima is a sort of negation of the desert. Our model and ideal of city is very occidental, and does not adapt very well to its context. The desert is seen a kind of non-place, not a part of our living environment. In this sense, there's a sort of irony in using a robot to draw a city onto the desert, as if it would be drawing it on the surface of Mars"