“It is not the space itself, but how each person perceives it”. Interview with Guillermo Santomà

Guillermo Santomà is an architect and designer. This year he has led the Inspired in Barcelona proposal at the Fuorisalone events, in Milan. He has done so with the Spa installation, an exhibition inside a church dedicated to light in which the artist explores matter as a source of energy and investigates how light acts on different bodies and how it transforms them. We talk with him to find out more details on this project.

Why build a spa in a church? What interested so much you about the institution of the spa that you considered building one?

What interested me was a simulated architecture rather than representation. And, somehow, the spa, like the church, proposes this vision, not only architectonically spatial, but also sensory spatial. It was a way of relating the intervention, with a further layer, by adding some rooms in the church so that the relationship between architecture and the body can continue. The entire installation is based on these two skins, the architectural one and the body, and especially in the space which ends up being filled with light. In the end, the entire structure is generated to contain the light that exists between the architecture and the bodies.

It could be said that the ultraviolet light is almost the protagonist of this space – have you considered it as another building material?

Yes. Part of the main idea of the project was to use light as a materiality. Therefore, we also looked for a base material that could reflect and work well with ultraviolet light. In fact, like stones, the colour white changes; when black light is projected, it burns out the white and the image looks almost as if it were a pixel. It stops being a rock to transform itself into a low-definition pixel. I think that this idea of the surface or the architectural skin translates into changing according to the light that touches it. Therefore, this ultraviolet light is important to create the whole environment and make it more three-dimensional.

Looking at the images, the project has some digital simulation, 90s-style video game aesthetics, such as “Doom”. What interests you about this language?

There has been an evolution. We look at Roman baths, then we look at the Renaissance evolution and the Renaissance reinterpretation of perspective. I think that video games have added a new perspective or a new chamber through which we see spaces. In this project we wanted to evolve this way of seeing the space and create these broken edges and all the volumes as a kind of continuous surface which is not solid. The idea that everything is a transforming surface, and that it is the shadows and the different chambers that make up the space. It is not the space itself, but how each person perceives it.

This project talks about skin, the architectural skin, digital simulation skin and the skin as a sense. What are your favourite skin treatments? Where do you spend most time in a spa?

I like the sauna; every part of the body is in contact with something hot. It completely relaxes me. The heat transports me to another state, as if my body were detached and begins to join with another materiality and as if there is a transmission of energy.