AWOMAWO

A World of Many Worlds
Design of the Simon Space at Casadecor 2020, Madrid

"In the Anthropocene, Humans are now at war not with Nature, but with [...] the Terrestrials. [...] To put it in the style of a geohistorical fiction. Humans living in the Holocene epoch are in conflict with the Terrestrials of the Anthropocene.

Bruno Latour, Face to Face with the Planet

The 2020 edition of Casa Decor was held this year in an emblematic building designed by the architect José EspelíusAnduaga, located in the Madrid’s upscale Salamanca neighborhood. From this early 20th century building, the Simon space will give Casa Decor visitors pause to reflect on the world to come in the 21st century.

AWOMAWO (A World OfMAnyWOrlds) is a meeting place for different worlds. The project is set up as a space within another space, a place to experience a world of many worlds, a cosmos that can be transformed through light...

Upon arrival at AWOMAWO, the visitor is welcomed by the first zone, an orderly passage of well-defined geometries: this is the space where humans live. Enveloping this first spacearea number of diverse, living and changing ecosystems: this space is the one that encompasses the rest of the Terrestrials. A light, continuous boundary connects and separates each zone, configuring a succession of enveloping environments: the plane of interaction between the two, a cosmopolitical front where Humans and Terrestrials must face their desires, interests, and needs.

The Simon space for Casa Decor 2020 has been designed by the elii architecture office together with the artist María Jerez. The team devised an interior landscape of light, plants, minerals, and everyday objects: a vibrantly colorful multiverse that creates ambiguous relationships between entities, ephemeral compositions of diffuse materialities, ghostly images of mixed bodies, of multiplied and crossed gazes... that place the spectator in an ambiguous positionblurs the line between who is the subject and who is the object.

In times like now in which we live in a new climate regime, AWOMAWO offers visitors a place to experience and reflect on the problematic place that humans take on the planet and their responsibilities. As part of its commitment to the theme of this year’s Casa Decor, the materials used to stage the Simon space will be recycled after the exhibition. The plants will be donated and replanted. All the wood used will be recycled. The Tarkett flooring will be reclaimed by the manufacturer for treatment in a recycling program. And finally, the lamps will be taken down and stored by Simon for future events. The space will thus be given a new life.