I came to Metropotamia because I had heard about the cats. They were known to crawl along the tattered ruins of unrealized utopias and scratch the surfaces of cast-off concepts. They climbed the partial follies of failed architectural proposals, jumped onto the damaged models of urban imaginings and slept in the crevices of fictional propositions.

Metropotamia, an urban grid filled with the remains of vacated office blocks and demolished social housing, was scheduled for demolition. The kittens who lived there were getting too old to still be tugging on their mother for milk, and their sibling play was turning into adolescent violence. I had come to find myself a kitten before they were all displaced as wandering strays.

My visit coincided with the cleaners, who were sweeping and attempting to make sense of the ruins. The cats were distracted and anxious, their tails arched and bristling. I got down on the ground, held out my hand, but they circled me with suspicion and turned their attention back to the brooms.

“I’m not connecting with any of them …” I admitted to Julia, who was plugging in a vacuum.

Metropotamia was the inaugural solo exhibition of collaborators Tim Ivison and Julia Tcharfas , at the Hilary Crisp Gallery in London (May-June 2011). The cats were brought in to Metropotamia to introduce an element of entropy, but the destruction they leveled was far more brutal to the Constructivist scaffoldings than the artists had intended. Now the cats watched, with an unapologetic curiosity, as cardboard geodesics were turned upright, as ramps made from carpet samples were vacuumed and as poured concrete gardens of litter were swept.

When the cleaners packed away their brooms, the kittens calmed down and began to explore a new tower, my trousers, a new structure, my jumper, a new perch on my shoulder. I took home the kitten that fell asleep in my lap, and named her “Apache” when she attacked the domestic terrain.

Heather Ring

Last summer, I captured the image shown above on a trip back home to San Juan, Puerto Rico. There’s not much to see. Behind those drooping banners sits an unassuming building where fishermen clean and sell their catch. The building intrudes onto an otherwise stately promenade disrupting bureaucratic ambitions for a touristed city. Perhaps the structure was there before vanity inspired officials to beautify the town? I believe it was. In this classist twist to the archetypal building-as-billboard typology, the Puerto Rican Department of Tourism has commandeered the facade as a venue for a campaign to present San Juan “desde el cielo” (from the sky). I assume that passersby are not meant to see what must appear to some politicians as unsightly. The building is accordingly covered like the Statue of Liberty in preparation for its disappearance by the magician David Copperfield. The banner’s suggestive view “from the sky” is delightfully distanced from the intricacies of everyday tasks, such as fishing, and is as thin as the vinyl tarp it is printed on.

Javier Arbona