Helin Bereket’s newest photographic experiment Relativity: Matching with La Muralla Roja
is on the verge between performance, staging, and bodily intervening in the built world. Pastel but glaring reddish, pinkish, violet and blueish shapes bathe in the Mediterranean sun. Gently outlined or almost disappearing into the bright sky and sea blue. At least color-wise. The form: geometric, brutalist, bold. Among the massive concrete shapes, volumes and lines, a single body: an attempt for a self-portait while “matching with the architecture”, as she calls it.

Rewind to the 70s in Spain: La Muralla Roja, a par excellence example of a Mediterranean postmodern architecture, in a diametric contrast to today’s architectural leitmotiv of transparency, sustainability, greenery. Rising tall from a coastal cliff, the Red Wall, as the title translates in English, is the work of late Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill Levi.

Together with a multidisciplinary team, Bofill has devoted two decades on designing series of buildings, collectively known as La Manzanera, a tourist resort in Calp, Alicante. Being part of this project, albeit a residential complex, La Muralla Roja reinterprets the Arab Mediterranean tradition of the kasbah. The monolithic fortress, whose appearance mirrors the opposite Rocka of Ifach, consists of a labyrinth-like geometric plan. It is based on grouping Greek cross typology elements and connecting them in an ensemble of patios. Crowned with flat roof terraces containing solariums, a swimming pool, and a sauna, the complex is undoubtedly an iconic work of architecture.

Captivated by its uniqueness, Bereket decides to conquer the monumental geometry of the “kasbah’s walls”, by inserting her body in various positions and capturing the result in photography. Instead of nowadays “architecture follows nature”, her photographic motto is “body follows architecture”.

Drawing inspiration from a famous lithography by M.C.Escher, titled Relativity, she too wants to indulge herself in a world where the normal physical laws of gravity do not apply. So, she develops photographic series under the same title. Relativity: Matching with La Muralla Roja is thus not Bereket’s first attempt of such nature. The endeavor to adapt to an architectural form is to be linked to a former series she created in Sicily.

However, this time the idea is to blend herself into the architecture in both form and color, the accent being on the color. At times her body is dynamic, active, energetic, at others, calm, adopting, meditative. While it struggles to embrace the form, and is challenged by steep insurmountable stairs, the organic outlines of her body merge with the straight and strict lines of the space. Her clothes borrow colors from the architecture palette; sometimes adopting even indistinguishable nuances. Like brushes of architecture’s color softly accentuating chosen elements.

And while the shapes and the volumes remain solid like a rock, Bereket subverts their monumentality by her physical presence. “Matching with architecture”, if only in act, color and in a future prospect, which experimental results are yet to be seen.