Launch of “Atlas” by Tito Pérez Mora

On 17 January, 2013 at 7:00 p.m. Ivorypress hosted the presentation of Atlas, a book by architect Tito Pérez Mora. The publication is a logbook of sorts that reproduces the notebooks and journals in which the author documented the creative process behind Atlas, a wooden rowboat he built by hand.

The vessel was made out of birch wood, with a 120 cm beam, 480 cm length and 60 cm draught. Once it had been assembled, Pérez Mora took it to Betanzos, A Coruña, in Spain, where he launched it on 23 June 2012 and began his voyage on it. Afterwards, he carried it on his shoulders with the help of several volunteers, and took it to the Oleiros woods, in A Coruña, and buried it there.

The book, a limited edition of hundred copies that have been signed and numbered by the artist, is an account of the birth, expedition and death of the vessel. In this voyage, the challenge, the process and the individual transformation form the main axis, constituting the work itself, beyond materiality.

Atlas is a proposal that has been curated and published by DEAR, an art collective that defines itself as a ‘plant for projects related to inspiration and experimentation’. In order to carry out the project, Tito Pérez Mora has collaborated with different artists and designers who have participated in the expedition in one way or another: Javier Lozano, SuTurno, Steve Mono, Aitor Saraiba, Manu Griñón, Sportivo-Lento, Grande, Carlos Gala, Lois Patiño, Circo Jewellery, Carla Andrade, Mikel Aboitiz, Lourdes Hernández, Mar Martitegui and Thisismaurix. ‘I am beginning to think that Atlas is going to bring together ideas and people’, explains the artist, ‘even though it is a project that was conceived as something intimate and independent, it continues to grow; people keep responding positively and with a constructive attitude […]. Perhaps the essence of Atlas is the sum of all of that, just like historic or geographic atlases that are composed by many prints, texts, tables, data…’

Tito Pérez Mora is an architect and co-founder of the architecture and design studio AKA Estudio. From 2009 he has been a professor at the Universidad Europea de Madrid, at the Escola Superior de Disseny i Enginyeria of Barcelona (ELISAVA) and at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED). From 2011, he has also coordinated the class ‘Los Espacios de la Moda’ (The spaces of fashion) at the Centro Superior de Diseño de Moda, attached to the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (CSDMM-UPM).