Birth of enthusiasm

It had been so many years since I had been to the Architects’ Association that it seemed in my memory like one of those paintings that live on, even if you never see them again.

Nostalgia is full of proper names, in all circumstances of life, and this institution is for me the memory and gratitude towards several proper names (Vicente Saavedra, Rubens Henríquez, El Arqui, Javier Díaz Llanos, so many…) and it is also the respect for the proper name, then so long, of the Architects’ Association of the Canary Islands, so resonant in a society animated, at that time, by the obligation of culture also in the media.

Apart from the circumstance for which it was so famous – the organisation of the Street Sculpture Exhibition, the Association was a generator of thought, discussion, dissidence, and culture half a century ago, and for this reason it attracted the participation of a wide range of personalities from the cultural reality of the archipelago.

Neither university activity nor the discussion about the arts, including literature, were alien to the Association’s concerns. It was a meeting point for several generations, starting with the one that was still alive, the generation of Gaceta de Arte, whose survivors participated in many of the calls, as well as subsequent ones.

I was taken to the Association by some contemporary friends, such as José Ángel Anadón or Carlos A. Schwartz, but that trip to which I was invited immediately had other friendly derivations from which I obtained enormous personal and intellectual benefit. When the Association also asked me to help in other initiatives, especially in some informative aspects of the organisation of the International Street Sculpture Exhibition, I threw myself into it, not only because of the novelty of the events that this cultural meeting implied, but also because I felt that something proper to a great capital city was moving. A mixed generation was setting to work so that Santa Cruz de Tenerife would cease to be that shop that Humboldt drew: the shopkeeper opens the shop, stands behind the counter and waits for no one to enter.

It was immediately clear that everything was serious, because the people who organised the sculpture event and all the cultural activities of the organisation were very serious, and also because at that time there was an awareness in Canarian society, on all the islands, that a leap forward had to be made to finally live up to a past that had been annulled by the disastrous post-war period that followed the horrible fraternal war.

The events held by the Association, those conversations on culture, territory and politics, and the international exhibition that followed, were all aimed in a very specific direction – to restore the desire to think and to do. We have always thought. It is inevitable, we are thinking societies, everything is thought in this life, we are thinking beings, but it is quite another thing to start doing. What changed at that time, and what resembled the Republican 1930s, was that, at last, citizens from different areas of cultural life, architects, plastic artists, writers, intellectuals, teachers, realised that after thinking so much about how they should contribute to the future of the city (of the cities) they had to provide it (these cities) with the precise instrument to get them moving. The objective was modernity, a word that has since been replaced by the ambition of laziness in which so many purposes are lumped together.

The argument, the script, was already set up, it could be designed on a simple piece of paper, for it was a matter of giving content (contents) to the concept of enthusiasm without which neither people, nor peoples, nor nations can advance. The encouragement came from some of those already mentioned, Vicente Saavedra, and the surrounding concert was as effective as the written melody. Everyone set to the task, day and night, and the enthusiasm was contagious. For a while the Association became a radiator of enthusiasm and universality.

Now I am back, after many years, at the Association, experiencing the resurrection of that spirit. And I left there rejuvenated, as if the past were not a shadow but a stimulus for the present to be called the future again at some point. I hope so.

Juan Cruz Ruiz