A conversation with the artist Carlos Bunga
Carlos Bunga’s (1976, Porto, Portugal) work reflects on the fragility and transience of the architectural, social or symbolic structures we live in. Through ephemeral materials such as cardboard, adhesive tape and reused furniture, he builds precarious architectures that present other possible ways of inhabiting, more open, sensitive, sustainable and humane. By means of his installations, paintings, sculptures and films – all of them with a performative dimension in which the physical action of building and destroying is felt –, Bunga challenges the rigidity of fixed structures and suggests more flexible systems, where fragility and instability are a starting point for change. His work is deeply political, an invitation to rethink how we inhabit and what we could build if we move away from monumentality and permanent structures that reflect power to suggest, instead, temporary, mobile and environmentally sensitive architectures.
In the pieces he created for the Pontevedra Biennial, Carlos Bunga brings back the experience of the project Ciudad de los Muchachos of Benposta (Ourense), a self-managed circus-city in Galicia that, during Franco's dictatorship, emerged as a form of daily resistance.