VÉRTICE is a site-specific installation conceived for the 2025 edition of the Mextropoli Architecture Festival, responding to the thematic invitation to reflect on what it means to inhabit the city. Installed inside Laguna—a former textile factory now transformed into a cultural hub for designers, artists, and architects—the work considers the passage of time as a living force that shapes both spaces and the communities that move through them.

The installation uses a series of suspended, semi-transparent textile planes whose delicate materiality stands in intentional contrast to the raw industrial architecture of the factory. The choice of fabric directly references the building’s original function as a textile production site. Over time, these materials naturally shift in color and degrade, and this inherent instability is central to the piece. Their gradual tonal changes, fading edges, and soft movements subtly animate the space, offering a visual and spatial metaphor for the layered temporalities of the site—the transition from an active factory to an abandoned relic, and finally to a vibrant cultural center.

Spatially, VÉRTICE creates a series of intersecting corridors and thresholds that encourage the visitor to move slowly, altering their perception as they navigate the installation. Light interacts with the fabrics and metallic structural elements, producing shifting gradients and shadows that evolve throughout the day. These atmospheric conditions emphasise the idea of time as something physically experienced through the body, not only observed.

The work aims to make visible the invisible rhythms embedded in the city: cycles of production and abandonment, memory and renewal, fragility and resilience. By placing a fragile, time-sensitive material within a robust architectural shell, the installation invites viewers to contemplate the coexistence of permanence and impermanence—both in the built environment and in the ways we inhabit it.

As the artist, I led the project from conceptual development to technical design, material research, fabrication coordination, and on-site installation. VÉRTICE serves as both a gesture of acknowledgment to the history of the space and a celebration of its new role as a site of creative production, highlighting how cities continuously transform through the accumulation of collective and individual narratives.