Gustavo Murillo

Gustavo Murillo

Olympics at Home

Text by Issac Marrero Guillamón
Marshgate Press
27 pages
2016

From the Artist:

Olympics at Home is a printed publication that combines photographs by Gustavo Murillo Fernández-Valdés with an essay by Isaac Marrero Guillamón.

The photographs, taken during the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games, depict one of Stratford’s residential buildings temporarily occupied by global media studios to cover the Games.

The written essay contextualizes the issues generated by the media studios and looks at the ways in which the urban landscape of Stratford was transformed during the Games, focusing on the reshuffling of the visual properties of the area through architecture and advertising."

This book takes us from the exterior of the building and its windows, and slowly takes us inside this Olympic occupied building. The first images of the book are of gray, banal, plain old boring windows of a typical building. They blend in with the white pages of the book, and they look as straight forward as the text alongside them. There is something very stiff, empty and bare about the first few pages – something you would probably never connect to such a vibrant event as the Olympics.

The people in these photos seem to be sad, almost lonely looking out towards something we can’t necessarily identify.

he last image that goes alongside the text is a very vibrant orange sky image.

This image opens up the next part of this book, which features the interior of this building. This second part is different mainly because it takes us from empty gray windows, to colorful and elaborated interiors.

Inside these rooms, apartments that were converted in to stations dedicated to the event, we get inside and see beautiful detailed images that document not only the Olympic event scene, but these London homes and the way they were converted.

I think what I find most interesting in these images, are the wires going across the room. You can feel the media, you can feel that this is connected to people, and millions of them. A juxtaposition between the homeyness of the space to the technology and its overwhelming occupation of that space in a violent and chaotic way. These cables run across all of the images, creating an illusion as if they connect all of them together. They are the only connection between these rooms to the people seeing the Olympics back at home.

hese architectural images are showing us the backend of the celebration. Behind the scene to an event millions tune in to, yet there is something almost sad about them, anti climatic. All the people in this book look serious, focused; they are looking into the screen and are surrounded by computers, phones and televisions. There is no ‘Action’, nothing seems to be happening as such, yet they are in charge of this grand event, happening just beyond those screens.  They become part of this grid of wires, and technology that is creating what we call the Olympics.

lease consider purchasing a copy of the book Here