Dear John

Dear John navigates the empty eruptions of constructed mass and incomplete landscapes of Peter Eisenman’s Cidade da Cultura de Galicia in Santiago de Compostela (2001-2012) to face John Hejduk’s towers. Intended as a new city for the culture of Galicia and to bring the autonomous region into the 21st Century, its stone hills sit painfully under-visited and over-funded. A cathedral without a body: built as an homage to his friend, the artist and architect John Hejduk (1929‐2000), Eisenman recovered an unbuilt project for two towers originally designed in 1992 as a botanical complex for Santiago’s Belvis park. Sided at the edge of the new site, the towers serve as a reception and exhibition centre today, generating electromagnetic interference radiating from antennas installed in the towers. What a joy to hear you through the radio interference: the words read from a letter to Hejduk tie abstracted political histories with hard contemporary contexts. Shots veer between the pragmatic and the poetic. The film explores dissonance and dialogues between the buildings, site and landscape, hinting at frictions between author and user, past and present, known and unknown.