About the maquettes
Regina Silveira
I usually make countless working models, but I do not preserve them. They are always constructed precariously and function as scaled-down places for various experiments. When all the decisions have been made, and by the time the work is being executed on a real scale, these models, generally made of cardboard, often do not even exist anymore.
My decision to make maquettes that function as a memory and document has always been associated with a certain anxiety in regard to ephemerality. To construct these maquettes was to dream about the permanence of works that I have designed since the 1980s for specific architectural spaces, initially executed with painting, and nearly always intended to disappear after a couple of months.
For some time, I rigorously constructed the maquettes on the same scale, with the aim of someday organizing them as a retrospective in miniature. I soon gave up on the plan to keep everything on a common scale, mainly due to the larger real dimensions that the works were assuming.
Recently, these maquettes have become increasingly restricted to works associated with specific architectures, since this is still the segment of my production that is for the most part ephemeral. Even though over the years I discovered the potential of digital matrices for re-creating configurations and allowing for the migration of images, these works generally live just once, in light of the unique circumstances they were made for. In any case, all of the maquettes, from the beginning, have had the same goal: to be a document that serves as a memory of the original, as a miniaturized work. They can be constructed after a good interval of time following the execution of the work, and sometimes they are only the memory of a project that was never actually executed.