Armando Guadalupe Cortés was born in Urequío, Michoacán, México and raised in Wilmington, California. He graduated with an MFA from Yale School of Art 2021 and a BA from UCLA in 2012 . ¿Y LA GENTE? from 2020, blends sculpture and performance to explore themes of memory, myth, history, geography, experience and materiality.
¿Y LA GENTE? (And the People?)
2020
Installation and performance
Clay, earth, iron oxides, stoneware
Each pillar 64” x 24” x 24”
During the performance of ¿Y LA GENTE? Cortes excavates the rammed earth columns surrounded by musicians and dancers of his native Mexican heritage. Once revealing a gold ceramic sculpture within each column, one resembling a nopal cactus and the other a milling stone, Cortes exits the gallery leaving the deconstructed pillars to remain for the rest of the exhibition.
Through blending performance and sculpture, he is able to question the dichotomy between myth and fiction as an antonym to history. Growing up in two worlds has lead Cortés to a fantastical take on the ordinary. He incorporates the multitude of symbols and identities from his family of farmers, migrants, manufacturers, office professionals, and professors in his material palette and choice of dress. In contrasting the mythical or in this case the colorful and culturally rich materiality with his business casual clothing, he illustrates the parallelism and tension within his life and work. This re-assembling of materials and cultural symbolism is crucial to how Cortes seeks to challenging notions of spectacle and viewership.
Sources:
Artist Website: https://armandogcortes.com/Y-LA-GENTE-2020
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/402306364?fl=pl&fe=cm
Bemis Center: https://www.bemiscenter.org/residents/armando_guadalupe_cort%C3%A9s
Location: Diriyah, Saudi Arabia
From This Earth Installation is a temporary installation by Karim+Elias in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia. Completed in 2024, the 220 m² project was presented as part of Layali Diriyah and consists of a series of porous earthen screens assembled from more than 1,400 hand-sculpted spheres. Rather than treating earth as a heavy and continuous wall, the installation reimagines it as a modular, open-air spatial filter. In this sense, the project is significant not only as an installation, but also as a contemporary experiment in earthen material practice.
The project is deeply tied to its location. Diriyah is described by its official destination platform as the “City of Earth,” and it is presented as the birthplace of Saudi Arabia. Within this context, From This Earth operates as more than a temporary pavilion: it becomes a material response to a place historically associated with earthen building traditions. The architects state that the work celebrates Diriyah’s craft of building with earth, so the project should be understood as a contemporary reinterpretation of local architectural memory rather than as an abstract sculptural object placed in a neutral site.
Karim+Elias describe their broader practice as a contemporary exploration of “sculpting with sand,” using locally sourced earth, clay, and water in custom-made moulds. In From This Earth, this material approach appears through a system of over 1,400 hand-sculpted modular spheres made from local material and stacked into earthen screens. This construction logic is important because it shifts earth away from its more familiar role as a monolithic mass or thick wall. Here, earth becomes a repeated unit, a surface condition, and a space-making device. The project therefore demonstrates how traditional earth-based craft can be translated into a contemporary modular language.
The installation’s spatial effect comes from porosity. The stacked spherical modules create filtered views, partial enclosure, and changing patterns of light and shadow. Designlab Experience describes the screens as evoking the traditional mashrabiya and recalling Diriyah’s vernacular triangular wind openings and rooftop silhouettes. Because of this, the project does not simply represent earthen architecture visually; it performs some of its environmental and perceptual qualities. Air, light, depth, and visibility are mediated through the earthen surface, allowing visitors to experience earth not only as a material, but also as an atmospheric interface.
This project is relevant to contemporary earthen architecture because it expands the definition of what an earthen work can be. It does not reproduce a traditional mud structure directly, nor does it use earth only for symbolic effect. Instead, it repositions earthen craft within a temporary cultural installation and demonstrates that earth can function as a contemporary design medium. From This Earth shows that earthen practice today can move across architecture, installation, art, and public event design while still remaining grounded in local material and cultural context.
