Chino Soria
Artist / Architect
Los Angeles, U.S.


Submission: The Poetry of Precarious

I was ten when a huge hail storm practically destroyed our little wooden house in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.  I can still hear the terrifying sound of the wind invading the room, ice cold, wet, the open windows swinging crazy, the broken glass all over, the shouts of my mother and the ones coming from my neighbors all around. Since then I have had a deep obsession with houses and the mechanisms that make things either solid or fragile.

I like to think about my current work as something situated in between art and architecture. I explore the aesthetics of that which is precarious and unstable, feeling somehow inspired by the methods of construction utilized in slums. Extreme poverty is terribly sad and humanly unacceptable, but at the same time I find a profound beauty and joy in certain constructions of the very poor. What I see is the amount of work, need, creativity and love applied in the process of building a house by hand, with whatever materials are around. I find a touching poetry in the precariousness of it all, which I try to reveal and honor through my work.





Bio:

Chino Soria is a self taught visual artist and an graduated from University of Buenos Aires with a degree in architecture. He was born in Argentina and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.



"Buenos Aires: 300,000 to 500,000 live in slums"
See Monte Reel, “In Buenos Aires, 'Neighborhoods of Misery',” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/28/AR2007042801178_pf.html, April 29, 2007.