About Idee Fixe

Cristina Guadalupe Galván was born on a Spanish tropical island, off the coast of Africa, on the year 1979. She came together with Spanish democracy and the Gods punished her parents with a “pain in the ass” daughter (quoting her father).

From an early age she disobeyed all figures of authority and questioned everything. She wanted to do and decide everything on her own terms. Despite her good grades in school, her attitude was also “a pain in the ass” for her teachers 😊 Who qualified her as “insuportable” (unbearable) at the age of 9.

At the age of 19 her mother invited her to live somewhere else, outside the family home. Later her ex-husband asked her the same thing.  

And lastly, she was even deported from New York! Where she was becoming a problem there as well for the local fascists 😊😊😊  

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So who is Cristina? I am afraid Cristina is just an artist. It took me a long time to realize this was what was bothering everybody. My female genius !!! 😊  She´s an artist with an architect´s training and methodology, with very conservative parents (a mom lawyer and a father judge who still doesn´t understand what she is doing), a very good and strict French education and she just arrived in New York in the wrong time, cause SIMULACRA ART WORLD is making big bucks manipulating and ruining art and culture.

Trumplandia is wrestling with the soul of the nation that gave birth to Democracy, and to some of the best art of the XXth century, which happens – it’s my theory – to be inspired by architecture. Or at least they share a lot in common.

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So, after a decade of architecture training in Barcelona, she moved to New York for her artistic training, while living off architecture jobs, mostly. I have shared and learnt from people like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (and Jimmie), Peter Halley and Dan Graham to name the most important, but I have also met and learnt from Gaetano Pesce, Peter Shire, Alison Knowles, James Wines, Phyllis Lambert and the CCA, to name a few…. And from New York city itself (the best school on earth) – a mix of Jumanjy and Alice in Wonderland – where I am going to go back as soon as we clear the air a little, cause my “unbearable” energy really found its home over there.

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And since learning is the key to everything, she has used her talking (and writing skills) to meet all of these teachers without having to pay any tuition fees, but on the contrary being paid for it!! Best job ever. She started collaborating with magazines in college and became a DAMn´s magazine correspondent in New York. Thank you DAMn 😊

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And now that she is an adult of sorts, she´s starting to see what she really is. It has taken her all this time:

                                          Something Between Art and Architecture.  

                       (And yes Dan, I read this sentence in the last page of one of your books 😊)  

 

And Idée-Fixe is the umbrella for so many different endeavors that pendulate between those two poles. Many projects are collaborations, since architecture is very collaborative, and I love people. When you collaborate there is always a “third man” that shows up.

As Sostres said, but also my architecture teacher Manel Brullet, “the project leads”, or THE IDEA. You have to listen to it, what it needs, and never impose your ego on it. Like with a child, you need to think what is best for it (there are bad parents as there are bad architects ).

And the fun is that journey. When it´s done, it´s over. The work is really the process, and the idea, what gets you going. Good ideas never leave you. Only the bad ones do.

It  is very important, for learning, to finish things. But all the life happens in the making. Hence the hundreds of images in this website-archival-blog (coming soon!)

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I forgot to say that you can hire me ! If you need a creative solution to anything in your life, I am your MAN 😊 From a Museum to a home, from a design exhibit to a kinetic sculpture, from an article to a book to a picture... Little Leonarda is here for you 😊

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And I hope you have the same fun looking at this site, as I had making it! Probably not 😊 I don´t know if I have reinvented the genre or, as they would tell me in school, I am again “HORS SUJET.”

 

But this is what I had to say…