Luis Úrculo (Madrid, 1978) is an artist. He explores all that is peripheral to architecture – the processes, developments and approaches that can be manipulated, sampled and translated into other scales through such diverse mediums as performance and video art. Qualified with his architecture degree from ETSAM, scholarships from Illinois Institute of Technology and the Chicago Institute of Design. He lives and works between Madrid, Mexico DF and New York.


Úrculo’s house “is a kitchen” jokes the artist in earnest, It’s an old house in Madrid, redesigned to “accomodate my life and my friends”. The kitchen is enormous. “It’s more than a kitchen. It’s the heart of the home, the fire, the place where friends and family get together”.

 

“Although I live alone, my house is always full of people. It’s very important to me that every day I stop working and take a couple of hours to cook, and enjoy eating and talking with friends. The kitchen is my social space. The library, on the other hand, is my map of the world. A cabinet of curiosities, where, besides books, I keep my collection of stuff, objects that have captured my imagination from my travels”.

 

“I see traveling as an exploration. I go to seek out a new world, and see what discoveries I can bring back with me. I like to collect things. I choose my destinations very carefully, and stay as long as I can, in order to understand the people and connect to their culture”.


“It’s fascinating. When you’re in a new place there’s this tremendous need to discover and understand everything. It makes you construct a mental map of the society, and the culture in your head. It’s amazing”.

 

Úrculo’s Behomm experience

“Now that I’m dividing my time between Madrid, Mexico and New York, my house is empty a lot of the time. That’s why I joined Behomm. Thanks to them I was able to swap homes with an artist from New York on my last trip, and to experience another creative environment”.

 

“Staying in the homes of other creative people is really rewarding, it’s about how people inhabit their space as much as what it contains. There is always something about the space and its contents that reflect that particular place, and the people who live there”.


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Luis Úrculo Home ID: 554

Interview by Ana Martínez Nebot