In this transdisciplinary project combining drawing, collage, in situ installation, and performance, Luisa Aristizábal activates earth as both a constructive and critical material. Initiated during the
Coordenadas Residency in Argentina in 2025, the project extends her ongoing investigation into architecture and power toward Antioquia, her region of origin, drawing on the National Palace of Medellín and the Paraninfo at the University of Antioquia as points of reference.

The central installation is composed of three suspended structures made from threads of earth and animal fat that reduce architectural fragments to lines in space. Rather than reconstructing buildings, Aristizábal dismantles them, bringing them to a minimal state in which architecture no longer asserts itself as volume, but instead appears as a fragile framework outlining emptiness. Earth operates here as a medium that unsettles hierarchies between solidity and precarity, between what endures and what falls apart. What would normally crack or disintegrate as it dries is transformed into structure, tension, and resistance.

This material gesture also evokes vernacular earthen construction techniques —such as tapia pisada, adobe, and bahareque—historically displaced by colonial and modern systems of
architectural value that privileged institutional monumentality as a language of legitimation. Cornices and ornamental details—traditionally associated with status and progress— appear
suspended and stripped of their representative function. They become vestiges: forms that no longer sustain authority, but instead expose its fragility.

By invoking the National Palace, now converted into a shopping center, and the Paraninfo, continuously marked by political and social tensions, the project questions which bodies, materials, and histories have been validated through architecture and which have been pushed to the margins. Between ruin and permanence, earth emerges not only as a constructive material, but as a critical force capable of undoing and reimagining structures of power.