Alejandro Aguirre

My project focuses on the connection between local businesses and what I call useless spaces. All humans have a choice: They can build or they can destroy. Functioning Construction is about humans as organic learning apparatuses—members of an ever-evolving species that constantly strives for efficiency, mimicking computers and software computations. The small family-owned businesses depicted in my project act as a living mind map, reflecting individuals' strategies for adaptation. Each tableau reveals an organic process that has been constructed through technological shifts and instruments acting in concert. Humans systematically strive, build, and destroy like nature. An abandoned pier loses structural integrity under loose foundations, and a dying tree reaches upward in the direction of the sun. The approach of death offers us a chance to rest and reflect, free from the burdens of contemporary life—a process nestled within a larger process. As an artist, I seek to create a world that mimics what I feel inside these spaces. I want viewers to explore the relationship between life, hope and false hope, usefulness and uselessness, and the importance of remembering and forgetting.