PROYECTO HELICOIDE: RESCUING A MODERN ICON FROM OBLIVION
WORKSHOPS AND RESEARCH CAMPAIGN
PROJECTED TIMELINE FOR CAMPAIGN: MAY 29- JUNE 28, 2014
EL HELICOIDE
Beached cruise ship, fallen flying saucer, futuristic ruin; sitting amidst the slums of San Agustín, in south-central Caracas (Venezuela), El Helicoide de la Roca Tarpeya looks different from every angle. And so do the many stories that haunt this construction, all as convoluted as its magnificent, double-spiral coils. True to its Babylonian inspiration, the Tower of Babel, El Helicoide too was an ambitious project stopped short, in its case by the less-than-divine designs of politics. Like its famous predecessor, this concrete building—constructed in 1960 as a drive-in mall where drivers could spiral up and down, parking right in front of the business of their choice—was halted shortly before completion. It was then abandoned to its fate, which included oblivion and decay; multiple failed governmental projects; occupation by squatters and intelligence police; and episodes of drugs, sex, and torture; all sources for an endless number of legends, each more fascinating than the last.
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PROYECTO HELICOIDE is a non-profit organization based in Caracas, Venezuela, that seeks to study El Helicoide as an invaluable part of the urban memory and imaginary of Caracas, as well as a prominent icon of global modernity and its contradictions. It was formed in early 2013 by cultural historian Celeste Olalquiaga along with a group of architects, cultural anthropologists, museologists and artists.
WHAT WE DO: THE PROJECT1) We want to rescue the memory of El Helicoide through archival research and community workshops. Most of the documentary material regarding El Helicoide (model, plans, different failed projects, etc) is either lost or scattered. We plan to compile it through a double approach: archival research and oral/creative testimonies. The latter will be gathered through workshops we will hold in the impoverished communities surrounding El Helicoide - San Agustín and San Pedro - which have lived alongside this sleeping beauty for sixty years.
2) We will display this material, along with artistic work directly related to El Helicoide, in a series of simultaneous exhibitions that will be showcased in five of Caracas' museums from September thru December 2014. A condensed version of these exhibitions will travel to other Latin American cities and the United States in 2015. We will produce a bilingual catalogue of the exhibitions.
3) We will create a public forum for El Helicoide through talks, conferences and guided tours which will accompany the exhibitions. This includes a website where we can make all materials available to a larger public.
4) We will study and analyze all the documentary, testimonial and artistic material and publish a bilingual book of essays discussing El Helicoide, its architecture, history, impact on the urban imaginary and relationship to modernity.
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WHAT WE NEED TO START DOING IT: FUNDSWe have the passion, the know-how and the people (see below in "Who We Are"), but we lack the means. The Venezuelan state recognizes the importance of our project, and is giving us four of its major museums: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), Museo Nacional de Arquitectura (Musarq), Museo de la Estampa y el Diseño (MEDI) and Museo de Bellas Artes (MBA), and we will also be exhibiting at the well-known Centro Cultural Chacao. However, none of these institutions have resources. They provide space, staff and minimal logistical support for the exhibitions and that's about it. The rest is up to us. Our most urgent need is to start the research and the community workshops in order to compile enough material for the exhibitions that will take place at the end of the year. Both need to start RIGHT NOW.
WHAT WE WILL USE THE MONEY FOR: WORKSHOPS, RESEARCH, WEBSITE
We've created eight community workshops (pinhole camera, lithography, stencil, children's literature, etc.) for fifteen to twenty people each over a period of three months. Between materials and instructor fees this will cost us $3,000. These workshops will not only provide us with oral and material testimonials from the community, but also provide community members with a recognition and understanding of what El Helicoide is, the opportunity of expressing their memories and feelings towards the building, and mainly with creative tools which they will be able to use for the rest of their lives. We want to establish a dynamic relationship with these communities and make them active participants of PROYECTO HELICOIDE, instead of the bystanders they have been for all this time in its shadow. Many of the materials from these workshops will be offered to our sponsors (YOU!!) as gifts for helping create them.
We have also put together an interdisciplinary team of researchers that will peruse through libraries, governmental archives, architectural plans, audio-visual footage and every other source that we can think of, in order to put together and understand the history of El Helicoide. The equipment (cameras, computers, scanner) and labor (fees for ten researchers, we have a lot of ground to cover and little time to do it!) that we need to carry this out will cost $15,000. We've already started doing this and are coming up with GEM AFTER GEM of El Helicoide, as you can appreciate in the photos we're showing here. Some of these materials will also be duplicated as gifts for you, our supporting friends, so you can have a tangible souvenir of your help in this important quest.
Finally, we need to set up a professional website with all these materials catalogued and digitalized for public use, so that the memory of El Helicoide is never lost again. We estimate that this will cost us about $2,000.
A BIT OF HISTORY: THE BUILDING
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A modern shopping mall, "El Helicoide: Centro Comercial y Exposición de Industrias", built in Caracas in 1960-61, was designed to include large exhibition halls for the burgeoning national industries (oil, gas, iron, aluminum, agriculture), an automobile showroom, a gym and swimming pool, restaurants, nurseries, discotheques, a giant cinema, a first-rate hotel in which all the major airlines had offices, a heliport to fly passengers to and from the airport, and a full system of internal access with diagonal elevators and mechanical stairs. At its summit, under a dome designed by Buckminster Fuller, visitors could purchase souvenirs. El Helicoide was state-of-the-art, even by US standards. Had it been completed, it would have been one of the world’s largest and most hi-tech malls.
Democracy dealt El Helicoide its fatal blow. How exactly this happened is still unclear. Some blame the government of Rómulo Betancourt, which, unwilling to continue and legitimate the dictatorship’s massive urban renewal of Caracas, put conditions on a line of credit that had previously been granted to El Helicoide. Construction came to a halt and the company sued the estate. In turn, the business owners who had bought into the project sued the construction company, which went bankrupt. Nelson Rockefeller attempted to buy El Helicoide, but the legal tangle was such that he couldn’t. End of story for El Helicoide, the mall.
During the next twenty years, the construction that made international headlines stood in almost total silence. Occasionally, the inhabitants of the surrounding communities and other displaced communities occupied it for brief periods. Throughout this time, the different national governments devised a series of cultural and/or commercial projects for the building, including a cemetery! One after one, all these projects, twenty-seven in total, failed. Some believe the place is cursed. The hill on which El Helicoide sits was, after all, named for Rome’s Tarpeian Hill, from which the daughter of the Roman general Tarpeius was thrown to her death after betraying the city to the Sabines.
Starting in 1984, the Venezuelan intelligence police (then DISIP, now SEBIN) gradually began to establish its headquarters in El Helicoide, the perfect panopticon with a 360-degree view of Caracas. A new kind of darkness set upon the building, this time arising from its conversion into a detention center. High-tech surveillance equipment was installed, officers delighted to be able to ride their cars to their offices à la James Bond. Since then, there have been political prisoners and torture in El Helicoide. The irony is staggering: a place that was meant to be a highway to consumer heaven became instead a stairway to hell, as if the spiral had spun downward instead of upward, opening the way for El Helicoide’s particular twist on its sacred referent, the Babylonian ziggurat. In the early 2000s, the DISIP was joined by training schools for the police and the military: the Universidad Nacional Experimental de la Seguridad (UNES) and the Universidad Nacional Experimental de las Fuerzas Armadas (UNEFA).
For the last thirty years, El Helicoide has been like a black sun, radiating inconspicuous state control, detention, and surveillance. For some, this fate might seem better than its lying in derelict abandon. Yet it is far, very far, from the grandiose aspirations that fueled its original construction. And farther away still from the sacred geometry underlying pyramids and temples, the spiral dance at the origin of life. Like them, El Helicoide, literally carved in stone, will outlast centuries of human history, even nuclear blasts. It will remain an icon of a future that never quite made it to the present.
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WHO WE ARE: SOME OF OUR TEAM MEMBERS-
CELESTE Olalquiaga PhD in Cultural Studies, Columbia University (1990). Her books, Megalopolis: Contemporary Urban Sensibilities (1992) and The Artificial Kingdom (1998) have become classics about modernity. Celeste writes for specialized journals and lectures worldwide. Established in NYC since 1982, she is currently in Caracas directing PROYECTO HELICOIDE, which she created and is promoting internationally.
MÓNICA Santander, Community Outreach Coordinator, has dedicated her career to community outreach programming and art education. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree with a minor in Cultural Administration from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1996). She has worked in the Education Departments for Jacobo Borges Museum, Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas and the Armando Reverón Museum, as well as local universities and schools.
MARÍA FERNANDA Jaua, Research Coordinator, architect from Universidad Central de Venezuela 1981, received her PhD in Architectural Projects from the Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña. Since 2013, she has been researching The Modern Form. She teaches Architectural History to undergraduate and graduate students since 1981. She has given numerous lectures and has published extensively in architecture magazines. She has experience in archiving, assessing and intervening cultural patrimony. She practices at Sanoja Arquitectura.
FABIOLA Arroyo, Exhibitions Coordinator, is a researcher, curator and visual artist. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the Instituto Universitario de Estudios Superiores Armando Reverón (2004) and her Masters degree in Literature from the Universidad Simón Bolívar (2013). She currently works at the Fine Arts Museum of Caracas and also has experience working at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Arturo Michelena Museum and the Jacobo Borges Museum. She was also part of the Visual Thinking Program by MoMA and the Cisneros Foundation for seven years.
LISA Blackmore, Editorial Coordinator, PhD in Latin American Studies, Birkbeck College (2011). Her research focuses on visual culture, urban space, memory, modernity and power. She lived in Venezuela from 2005 to 2013, where she worked as a professor, curator and translator. She is currently teaching Latinamerican Studies at the University of Leeds, UK, and preparing a book about modernity and dictatorship in 1950s Caracas.
RAFAEL Pereira, Researcher and Consultant, is an Architect, Professor and former Coordinator of the History of Architecture section of the Carlos Raúl Villanueva Architecture and Urbanism Department of the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He has written extensively on the history of Modern Architecture in Latin America and its relationship to the visual arts. He also works as an independent consultant for various art collections.
LUISRA Bergolla, General Manager, is a museologist and social communicator. He received his degree in Social Communications and Museology from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (2001) receiving the "Monseñor Pellín" distinction. Specialized in cultural management, heritage and public space. He has worked both in the public and private cultural management and always based on two lines of action: protection of cultural heritage and interventions in the public space.
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For more information visit our blog http://proyectohelicoide.wordpress.com / our facebook pagehttps://www.facebook.com/ProyectoHelicoide2014 and twitter feed @proy_helicoide.
If you have further questions related with Fundraising please contact us at: fundraising.helicoide@gmail.com
If you have further questions related with Proyecto Helicoide please contact us at: proyectohelicoide@gmail.com
Si Ud. desea hacer una contribución en bolívares, favor contáctenos a fundraising.helicoide@gmail.com
PROYECTO HELICOIDE is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non‐profit arts service organization.
Contributions for the charitable purposes of PROYECTO HELICOIDE are tax‐deductible to the extent permitted by law. For more information visit our Fractured Atlas page: https://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/fiscal/profile?id=10078
PLEASE NOTE: you will receive your rewards in January 2015, once our exhibitions close.
