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Church Words

Photographic series of a fragment (again) of the weekly marquee of the Church in 86th and Lexington (NY)

This series spur from someone else´s work, the church minister or a clerk of the Park Avenue United Methodist Church in Manhattan, who every week chose a great aphorism to write on their marquee outside. They were really uplifting! It was like art on the street. I even thought of buying myself a marquee :) But it´s been so overdone already...

They had philosophers and writers more often than not. I started taking pictures of fragments, to see if I could still keep the meaning of the whole sentence.

I found out that the meaning became clearer. The essence of it. I also came to think that aphorisms are divided in two, one part is enlightenment and the other more like propaganda.


An example: "The opposite of love is not hate. It´s indifference." By removing the "It´s indifference" and only keeping the "The opposite of love is not hate" the sentence still has all its meaning but nobody is telling you exactly what it is... It is more free...

And I found in the book "Remain in love" by Talking Heads founding member Chris Frantz a much better version:

"The opposite of love is not hate, it´s SELFISHNESS." Which confirmed my theory on aphorisms :))

Project Gallery

Idée Fixe  is a Transdisciplinary Studio of Art and Architecture, run by Cristina Guadalupe Galván.

If in a website you normally find finished objects and products to share, what we are sharing here are more ideas – tested, developed and lived -- and their processes, that in many instances ended up happily physical. The creative process is about experimentation and the life that goes with it. The life and the people.

While building this site I came across a quote that explained it to me much better, by architects Josep Ferrando & Marta Poch, for their Quaderns d´Arquitectura, issue 273, THE THINKING TRADE:

      In a world dominated by images of the finished object and the immediacy of access to multimedia content, this issue of Quaderns sets out to reflect on the role of the architect –by means of their working processes, of the working methods (…) leaving the image of the built project on the background.

For artist Sol LeWitt, the process was also the work:

      The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. (...) It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned. 

Architect Josep Maria Sostres said something similar:

      The project, obviously as a mental conception, as a will to form, has a sovereignty, it has an internal power that must be imposed.

So this archive-website of Idee-Fixe, records more these ideas, processes and in many instances the collaborations that made them possible.

It´s about THE LIFE OF IDEAS.

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