Toni Catany Worldwide Images Heart / mateoarquitectura
Toni Catany International Photography Center / mateoarquitectura
Text description provided by the architects. In the old town of Llucmajor (Mallorca), occupying part of the house where the photographer Toni Catany was born, we built the International Photography Centre, based on the work and the collection of this great artist.
The place, the history, the remains, the scale, the classic typology of houses closed to the outside and open onto courtyards… all of this obviously forms the base for the project. They are phantoms or realities that accompany us, though we have to control them.
However, we did not forget that our mission here was to build a contemporary museography center of reference as a suitable setting for exceptional works.
We conserved remains, rebuilding some, we primitively restored the façades with care… But the space is new, open, flexible, large, available, with very controlled light, sometimes shadowy…
Some singular elements appear a staircase that takes flight, another that recreates the chromatic world of the artist in question…
Though the protagonist is always the space with an accompanying detail at hand that is both radical and approachable.
This is a building constructed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with its different moments of isolation, distance, and digitality. Though here we had to produce something that was concrete, close, manual, in a distant and sometimes desperately archaic world. It was not easy.