The still functional architecture of the Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, now the cultural epicenter of the city of Montevideo, constantly evokes its past. From the time when this building, now dedicated to the arts and culture in the heart of the historic center, functioned as a detention center for almost 130 years, better known as the Migueletes Prison. This great panoptical machine dedicated to confinement and isolation was deployed as an instrument of modernity to control and erase bodies. How can we reconstruct this great machinery into a device for the memory of bodies and matter that layer by layer juxtapose and recompose again and again this physical and symbolic space that we inhabit? 

Siempre se tiene 19 años en un rincón del corazón' was born as an anarcheological exercise that tries to embrace a past whose scars and wounds are still latent, even 20 years later. In this search, the technological device was interwoven as a sensitive interface that helps to make visible the depth of our contemporary biopolitical architectures. 

This work consists of an installation composed by two drawing machines that rewrite on the walls different texts found in the abandoned cells of the prison, written by the prisoners once confined in this space. These machines for memory interact as gestures in the story of this space that still disputes its identity, articulating a dialogue between the latency of  the past and the present traces of the bodies and its material memory.  

This project was deployed as an exploration to develop machines and algorithms that allow us to experiment the human-machine-architecture interaction as a collective experience of territories. Through a transdisciplinary approach this project explores digital open source technologies to recover the structural memory of a place, bringing into tension the systems of power in dispute with the bodies that inhabit it and shape it along with its symbolic and material new resignifications, ruins, and fissures.