The Performative Turn

In the world of art, as in literary studies or the social sciences, one has got used to successive turns* by which tendencies metamorphose into one another.

Over the last decades there were the linguistic turn, the cultural turn, and, of course, also the performative turn, by the likes of which the influence of performance over other artistic media was somehow extended and confirmed.

Now, apparently also architecture has its performative turn. The prevalence of diagram or program in recent design approaches to all things architectural, like once of the principle of autonomy or the spirit of place, now gives place to every possible aspect of the performative in architecture.

Beyond the activation of program’s abstractions, and behind such a turn lies, as it would be expected, one relevant paradigm shift. And here we may speak of a return of the user – not to say simply the return of the repressed – to the troubled horizon of current architectural concerns.

After the delusions of grandeur of the recent architectural self, the ever-cyclic return to the needs of the end-user of architecture now takes place by integrating use narratives into conceptual strategies of design, but also by introducing expressions of these concerns into the very shaping of built forms.

Didier Fiuza Faustino, Opus Incertum, 2008, shown at the 11th Venice Biennial.

Thus one discovers the very imprints of bodies blooming in recent projects – reconnecting architecture with traditions of performance art –, just as one recognizes the performatic aspects of participation and self-building as instrumental in reconnecting architecture’s profession of faith with local communities and broader urban audiences.

These and similar reflections are bound to kick off the discussion on the performative in architecture that will take place this Saturday at 3pm, at the newly open, Exyzt designed Curator’s Lab, within the Art & Architecture programme of the ongoing Guimarães European Capital of Culture.

The panel is also a crucial moment of the multi-stage event and urban intervention competition Performance Architecture, which I’m curating as a last remnant of my previous free-lance livelihood in Portugal.

While key-note speaker Isabel Carlos will present her views on Performance Art and its potencial re-enactings in the contemporary urban field,  jury members Didier Fiuza Faustino, Raumlabor, A77 and Office for Subversive Architecture will show their own takes and ideas on performative architecture and the city.

The talk promises insights into some potential futures and options of a wide-spreading mode of architectural practice – while also giving way to the announcement of the Performance Architecture competition winners, who will get to build their own proposals in the public space of Guimarães.

Useless Architecture?

The name of this talk evokes the title of a recent conference given by Peter Eisenman. In Wither Architecture? the gentle and mature starchitect situated his recent practice within a double condition of lateness: a late work in the career of his author, and also an inevitable expression of the often called late capitalism. A charming weakness emerged from the almost anxious, if self-ironic, attempt to inscribe his work in the flow of architectural history. Eisenman’s obsessive use of fictional, historical or topographical grids to intellectualize and justify the form of his buildings came about as a means to achieve disciplinary legitimation. However, this was also a Piranesian prison that kept the creator from the pure creative act. Uttering a kind of last will, the architect aspired to one of the most useless and unreachable aspects of architecture: everlasting recognition. So as to produce relevant architecture, do we really need the various legitimations of visibility? Is architectural culture utterly useless or is it’s thinking strictly necessary to reiterate again and again the ultimate, unobvious usefulness of buildings?

This is the concept I’ve presented to ExperimentaDesign when invited to host one of their 2011 OpenTalks. With talk hosts such as curators Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Zoe Ryan, this promises to be one of the biennial’s Opening Week highlights, taking place as from today at 11am  in another amazingly empty heritage building in Lisbon’s historical core, until recently the home to the Boa Hora Law-Court.

.. At Trial in Boa-Hora Court, 1980. Via Memoriando.

So, this is the weird setting in which tomorrow at 11am invited ladies Alexandra Lange, architecture critic at the Design Observer, Folke Koebberling, from Koebberling & Kaltwasser, and Gretchen Mokry, from Architecture for Humanity will take architecture culture to martial enquiry…

The issue here is not really if buildings and shelter are useful, which they obviously are, but more if we may dismiss architecture thinking and its (dis)contents as distant and useless – as so many seem to assume too quickly.

Other Little Magazines #21 – From Blog to Print

The launch of the Portuguese edition of The Printed Blog inspired me to review the growing fad of blogs that want to become magazines. This being said, the pile of new magazines awaiting a reference in my desk was also about to crumble as spectacularly as the tower of Babel and I had to trim it down in anyway I could.

It is not that the new franchise of the apparently sucessful The Printed Blog deserves too much consideration. Being launched in the silly season,* this seems to have convinced its editors to look for ultra-lite, fast-consuming, totally unconsequential “literature” found in the Portuguese internet.

Perhaps they hoped that this would reflect a general local attitude of postponing the need for serious thinking on the current state-of-affairs of this small Atlantic backyard. Or on anything else, for that matter. Like the t-shirt I saw the other day, this edition tells me “I smile because I have no idea of what’s going on.”

As such, the only memorable fragment of writing I found in this entire, shallow publication was a curious, self-aware quote by my Facebook friend Marta Lança – who incidentally I’ve never met in real life – who rightly hints that in the blogosphere “only a few follow Deleuze’s advice: to resist the social forces which compel us to talk when we have nothing to say.”

Unfortunately, this compilation of original pieces by supposedly “important” Portuguese blogguers – who to appear in print apparently need the moral support from some television figures and a vaguely erotic wrapping – tends to confirm a rather depressing truth.

Indeed, if it’s penible enough to sometimes have certain thoughts perpetuated in personal weblogs, it’s downright thick to go through the trouble of selecting, editing and assembling those into a glossy, resource-wasting paper product…

At least, however, the new publication has induced me to look at better examples of blogs that resist embracing the potential forgetfulness of an internet which is becoming the giant graveyard of our fleeting beliefs and opinions.

These are the blogs that, tending to be specialized rather than general, and normally being based on the sharing of relevant information and commentary, obviously felt that there was enough substance in them to justify the move into the realm of the presumed eternity of print.

As suggested by Chris Pearson we are indeed at the forefront of a petit paradigm shift. Firstly there was the time in which the well-known, Goliath magazines went on to grab a good chunk of the internet’s growing share of attention. Now it’s time for those who kickstarted and consolidated their audience in the web to try and convince it that they should pay for the correspondent physical versions.

Within this scenario, some people are simultaneously more and less ambitious and they go directly from their ultra-popular blogs into the book format. In the field of architecture, we have our very own Jeoff Manaugh as a good example.  Books are hopefully more timeless than mags and they require considerably less effort if one has already abundant material for a one shot enterprise.

Magazines, on the other hand, being to lasting literature what tweets are to blogs, are more akin to some blog’s idiosyncrasies. Magazines too, at least the niche ones, normally rely on presenting new trends, new authors, new products as part of their essential presence in the middlebrow mediasphere.

Following on the pioneering spirit of Its’ Nice That – with its faithful reproduction of the blog’s shorthand logic of one image and a few words onto the printed page, out since April 2009 and now at its 6^th issue – let me then introduce you to two recent examples of this revealing trend.

M|I|S|C is published from Toronto since the Spring of 2011 and it’s true to another important characteristic of blogs: it is totally and exclusively written, published, edited and directed by Idris Mootee. Idris also provide us with most pictures courtesy of his Leica and travels. Way to go, Idris!

Being a little too obsessively focused on branding, i.e. marketing, the collection of posts from one year of Idris’ Innovation Playground has the peculiar quality of being more didactical than usual – which, together with its portfolio presentations, explains why adverts come mostly from design institutions.

The mag’s first edition is indeed almost entirely dedicated to issues connected with its motto title Movement|Innovation|Structure|Complexity, thus extensively coaching us through jargon concepts like “design thinking,” “wild card scenarios,” “creativity,” “crowdsourcing,” or “corporate imagination.”

This is like as if magazines are being induced to become ever more specific by the very specialization of blogs. Which also suggests that our education manuals may about to go through severe changes so as to become sexier and cooler – so as to actually again have some lonely soul reading them.

Circus, on the other hand, first (and lastly) presented itself as another bookazine compiling “the best of the web”(as The Printed Blog also claims), so becoming another result of “the ultimate clash between online and print.”

Loyal to the high level specialization of blogs, Circus’ premiére issue was totally dedicated to fashion, asserting right at its first pages that the internet has definitely altered the very perception and functioning of such creative fields.

As such, Circus goes beyond your usual fashion magazine and it too is a pedagogical journey through unexpected fetishes of the fashion blogscape, basically relating fashion to everything, including architecture.

In this densely packed bundle you may go from the life of models and the perils of the profession’s journalists, to the more obscure aspects of the “woolie scene,” the “fashion disabled,” “fleckologie” and other such personal slot preferences.

While most effectively illustrating the notion of “bloggers gone wild”, as others “blogger’s magazines” will certainly do in the near future, Circus is finally and ultimately self-reflexive on the very nature of the different media it bridges. Be it when blogging, fashion, or blogs turning to mags are echoed, reflexivity arises as the stronger trait of this new territory of communication’s precursors.

In this sense, these publications also subtly disclose that people are starting to acknowledge a renewed phenomenon. In a world riddled with information overload we more than ever seem to long for those figures or media that will digest, reference and point us to relevant content.

And this is ultimately why, despite the cultural or publishing financial crisis, the editorial, curatorial and consultant professions are on the rise and give place to entirely new forms of stardom. As Bruce Sterling recently put it, it’s all about “the trained pig and the rare truffle.”

Flooded by “intelligent noise” – a notion urban strategist Arun Jain suggested at the recent “Another Urban Future” think tank  – many people increasingly cherish those who can somehow reassure them that they are investing their precious time in the piece of information or opinion that best suits their needs.

And yet, even with a little help from my guru – and as philosopher Modjtaba Sadria reminded us in the same discussion of future cities  – there is still a crucial difference between information and knowledge. You have to first know what to do with the former, so that the latter may eventually become an integral part of what you are or want to be.

The Rise of Performance Architecture

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In the last decade, ephemeral architecture practices of numerous architects and artists collectives have been developing as a critical answer to the results of growing mobility in the recent neo-liberal context, using various performative tactics for “activation” of the local potentialities for social change. The most interesting ephemeral architecture projects are fast-statement critical practices, collective actions towards the creation of temporary places for encounters in an ever-changing urban environment.
 But, because these actions have to be strongly connected to longer-term local actions, they must assume a transitory nature that calls for a social transformation, for a next step. This is very performative. And this is where the performative action becomes a radical social gesture that goes far beyond the production of an aesthetic object.

In TodaysArt Festival Brussels 

Sometimes one gets the funny idea that a certain trend is gathering memento. One thinks about it and presents the notion to a couple of friends. Given the opportunity, one writes an article about it. And then one organizes it as a proposal for a potential exhibition that will allow for further research.

With the notion of Performance Architecture most of these steps took place around 2006. My first article on it came out in a student archizine in 2007. The “exhibition” was first suggested to Mirko Zardini at the CCA, just before the 2008 finantial crash put an halt to all the institution’s external projects. And then it was again proposed to Laboral, and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, and the Barbican. However, it seemed to be too soon* to all of them.

Finally, a few weeks ago I’ve signed the contract that signals the idea found its first partners at the Guimarães 2012 European Capital of Culture. As such an international competition is to be launched in October for five ephemeral interventions in the Portuguese “cradle city.” Look forward to it.

At the same time, events coincidentally started to pop-up across Europe suggesting that the unexpected relationship between Performance Art and Architecture is now something to watch for.

In fact, while Madrid-based Ariadna Cantis curated an event along similar lines in 2009, it seems that it is only this year that the notion is being more amply recognized and debated – when some of its noteworthy protagonists have reached already more than a decade of consistent urban interventions .

After the unexpected, yet historical and festive gathering of some relevant protagonists of this tendency at the disPlace conference, as organized by Dédalo magazine in Porto, new conference events around the theme will now take place in Den Hague and Brussels, at the TodaysArt Festival, and later this year again in Madrid, at the IV Encuentro Internacional El Arte Es Acción.

It might take a few years for certain tendencies to become clear. But when they do, they do. Or they will. Specially when they are coming from the streets. And this is not a bonfire of vanities. It is a matter of both emergency and urgency.

Read All About It!

Yesterday, between classes and getting on my weekly commuting fate back to Lisbon I happily squeezed in a book launch at Porto’s FBAUP arts school………… In fact, I was quite looking forward to (Dis)Locations: Exile, Topology, Relocation as, just after my recent contribution to Abitare, this publication brings out my latest article on curating architecture as an operative practice.

Edited by artist and researcher Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro, (Dis)Locations has the unusual and praiseworthy attribute of conflating student’s research work with newly produced, specially commissioned theoretical reflections on the very subject of their study.

In the spirit of an exploratory, transdisciplinary object, you may thus find here essays on the mutating codes of landscaping (Laura Castro), a possible topology of media (Miguel Leal), the shifting status of public art (Jeremy Hunt & Jonathan Vickery), and even a graphic novel on non-gravity architecture as a reenacted, roving Noah’s Ark (Jimenez Lai).

In the midst of this profusion, my extravagantly titled piece, “Ex-, Post-, Re-, Dis-Locus: Curatorial Thinking and the Dislocation of Architectural Discourse,”  dwells on how the practice of curating, as influenced by its developments within the contemporary art world, goes against the grain of architecture’s aspiration to permanence – and thus may offer a paradoxical resistance to the latent petrification of its connected critical discourse.

The essential argument here is that, given its “wandering nature” and its “permanent dislocation of attention” on the make, curating favors an outlook on architecture that, contrary to criticism’s traditional tendency to freeze the social and aesthetic values of architecture, rather questions such values incessantly.

As an activity that is perversely close to trend watching and cool hunting – but is also prone to reframe and orchestrate the unending “re-making of the perceptive apparatus that art pursues and provokes” – curating thus offers the dislocation of the “critical gaze as one of the tools through which architecture continuously overcomes itself.”

If you want to read more about the arguments that sustain such aggravating propositions, as well as all the other wonderful stuff included here, you will have to look for another valuable book that, for the exception of two obscure bookshops in Porto, will most likely be impossible to find anywhere in the world… and also plainly hard to order online. (Unless you go here!)

It is not necessarily the case that academic publications are trying to avoid commodification and look like as if they are rarefied. As distribution succumbs to the endless reproduction of the already known, this just seems to be the destiny of many paper publications nowadays.

As it happened with vinyl records, interesting books are turning into profligate limited editions for fierce collectors only.

Interiors

 

There was a year in my life in which I would wake up every day at 11.37am. As if possessed by an internal alarm clock, I would always be pulled out of my sleep at precisely 11.37am. There was a reason for it. Every morning, there was this luxurious radio show that would broadcast a full music LP. Unlike many of today’s play-lists, the long-play was taken in as a coherent whole, an articulate soundscape. The radio show was called Interiors. After a few words of introduction, day after day, one was allowed to enter another unexpected, personal inner landscape.

The Interiores exhibition is coming to an end this coming Saturday – with the corresponding limited edition book set for December.  Today I’m also doing  a one-day installation, The Golden Temple, part of the ongoing EMPTY CUBE project that, in this instance, runs parallel to the Lisbon Architecture Triennale. So, it’s a good moment for a sort of mid-term assessment.

As the wanted ambiguities of one’s own work become the subject of scrutiny, and as the focus shifts from talking about others to talking about oneself, there is a thin line that is forever broken. So let’s take that thread up.

In the scope of curatorial or critical activity – which Ethel Baraona Pohl just readdressed when referring to my recent Abitare article – you are expected to maintain a certain distance from your subject. My position, however, is that today one can be so entangled in different modes of activity, that this distance becomes truly impossible. And this is potentially not that bad.

The growing relevance of the social networks – which simply make transparent the rules that were already in place in any competitive cultural game – only adds to the impossibility. Against the progression of technical specialization, cultural personas can no longer be contained in the straightjacket of a single position.

If I have always claimed the right to contradiction, and if I have more recently reclaimed the return of operative criticism – revisiting Banham’s immersive openness as opposed to Tafuri’s historical dead ends – I must now re-embrace the strange, ridiculous notion of the one-man band. As I’ve done in my conference last week at the BIArch, in Barcelona.

Being a one-man band is hard. Doing too many different things is considered a personal offense to many people. But this notion can be useful, especially if one thinks that digital and communication technologies, rather than merely supporting a formal language, modify the way we operate. They provoke alterations both at the physiological and professional level.

Think of Mathew Herbert. Being a one-man band today simply means that you can instantly outsource all your needs and, without the burden of a large band or office, you may assume control of many different creative processes happening at the same time. Collaborations, cheap telecommunications, digital capacity are the tools that allow for this creative multitasking.

And then, wonderful things like this may happen.

This is why I think that, today, embracing apparently contradictory activities may be enriching. And this may be enriching as precisely the opposite of being superficial – like in “not going deep enough into a specific matter,” as contesters of interdisciplinarity would immediately and joyfully claim.

If different activities indeed constantly feed on each other – as has been the case of artists that pursue diverse formal or methodological strategies – the complexity of the oeuvre comes out of the fuzzy superimposition of the different tasks being performed, and not at all from the value of a single work.

Allowing yourself, on top of this, to also publicize your own self-enquiries may be deemed somewhat dubious, if not simply egocentric. But, isn’t it the advantage of the new wiki mindscape that any line of enquiry should be pursued so as to contribute to general knowledge?

As Interiores is coming to its end, and even if it its contents will live on as a special publication, this is the right moment to face up to the potential divide that may come up between what I make and what I write.

Do as I say, not as I do. This maxim, as it usually happens, is not the product of popular knowledge, but the remnant of a refined intellectual critique on hypocrisy. One that can be traced back from the New Testament right into John Selden’s “Table-Talk” back in 1689.

As I’ve been recently dubbed a moralist, and as I myself like to quote a once old friend as not wanting to preach to the converted, I guess I should go back to the core of this dictum and reflect upon a few things.

And I should do it for one simple reason: while I constantly preach for diversity and contamination – and even occasionally for an aesthetical shift towards the “ugly” – my architecture work sometimes feels too slick and polished.

It’s almost as if I wouldn’t know how to do otherwise. However, the conceptual operations that lay behind the creation of these spatial interventions – objects with which I invade existing places – are certainly becoming more hybrid and trying to avoid the repetition of basic formalist traps.

If they represent some form of minimalism – when I’ve frequently raged against minimalist chic – it’s only because they eventually intend go back to the crux of minimalism as this was once described by Hal Foster. And then again, they willfully blend with other cultural strategies, such as pop or fiction.

These interventions want to create disturbance, rather than just accommodating need. And the fact that collaborations are also involved in the presentation of these projects means that further contamination is to be added to their intrinsic invention, originating new critical layers.

João Paulo Feliciano, Around the House (Daft Punk is in my House), 2002-10.

Doing interior architecture has become more and more of a political project, and one that goes along critical curatorial practices and writing itself. In this sense, what I do does echo what I say, but within a distorted aesthetic arena that is an integral part of a practice research into both ethics and aesthetics.

I recycle existing spaces, I revive them through new narratives, just as I claim that architects should be the first to tell western society to stop building anew in yet untaken territory. And I believe those acts of recycling can again be an arena in which architects again assert an artistic and political stance.

In the middle of an arresting institutional crisis, one must find ways to still exercise one’s acquired knowledge. As such, as Brazilian singer and poet Chico Buarque once sung in the beautiful and subversive “A Good Advice”, one provocation comes to mind: do as I say, do as I do, act twice before you think.

Guess What I’m Doing #07

While I’m preparing my conflation of Reyner Banham and Manfredo Tafuri for the BIArch’s Theory, History & Criticism seminar – which I have the privilege to kick off this Thursday in Barcelona – it is also my special pleasure to announce that my first “solo” show is on its way.

“Interiors” opens on the 19^th October at Cristina Guerra gallery, in Lisbon, as one of the official events that run parallel to the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2010.

I say “solo,” but I should say “collective.” As it should, the exhibition relates to ambiguity, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity. Is it an architecture show? Is it about photography? Is it about the spatial turn in contemporary art?

“Interiors” features perspectives on some of my architectural work produced over the last 10 years by 4 artists and 1 architecture photographer: Filipa César, João Paulo Feliciano, Daniel Malhão, Edgar Martins and Fernando Guerra.

Each of the outlooks that surfaces in the exhibition presents a different reflection on the relationships of architecture and its visual representations, while allowing us to rethink interiors as a source of experimental and spatial practice. A practice that, after modernism, architects have gradually left behind to other players.

A limited edition catalogue will expand on the contents of the exhibition featuring work by yet another photographer, a film director and previously unpublished artworks by Carlos Lobo – an upcoming artist who coincidentally was just nominated to the seminal BES-Photo prize last week…

Today

Today, the ninth day of the ninth month of 2010, I went to the beach.

I went to the beach. And I’m not simply bragging. I know how such a sentence may spark a whole set of mixed feelings – some slimy emotions somewhere between envy and contempt. But, believe me, this was the most rational thing I could do in the middle of this training day.

Going to the beach is always therapeutic because, other than sinus, it is good to measure your smallness against the breadth of the ocean. I’m no surfer but, as you’ve gathered by now, I like to catch waves without the help of any stiff board. The Portuguese call this “fazer carreirinhas.” I suddenly realized this could be a most ironic metaphor on professional life.

Today, going to the beach was therapeutic because I had an early start in the Consulate of one of the stupidest States in the planet. And, no, this time this was not Portugal. (Even if Portugal frequently competes for the position of the stupidest country in Europe – no wonder televisions and newspapers are now giving so much airspace to a convicted pedophile.)

Now – you must understand that stupidity makes me really nervous. Like that Woody Allen’s character that couldn’t understand mimicry, in the face of stupidity I start to get cold sweats and spasmodic attacks. I can’t help it.

So, I must go to the beach.

This unfortunate condition is probably why I can’t really understand Diesel’s current media campaign that cleverly advises us to Be Stupid. The motto is itself stupid, unless these guys are really being smart asses and saying that in the face of major institutional and state stupidity we must, per force, play dumb.

As a major poet said around here, there are indeed places in which, if you want to be king, you must take one of your eyes out… You know the saying… It was actually Erasmus’ saying that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

One must not forget that these people are the same who have outrageously produced one of the best future scenarios we have seen in a long time in any ad – another of those images that was patiently seating on my desktop, waiting for the right moment to fit into some kind of unexpected train of thoughts.

I mean, this scene is bound to happen exactly as depicted somewhere along the next 1000 years. The cycles of history so dictate. However, as The Smiths used to sing, you just haven’t earned it yet, baby.

But, I mean, be stupid? I can still believe that being stupefied will very eventually make you more creative. But being plain stupid?

Anyways, stupid of me – or of my damned curator nature – because I thought I could be a sort of an idle cultural tourist in the middle of a sort of ongoing post-war zone. Rem Koolhaas has done it with Lagos, true. But what did really come out of it apart from his own enlightenment out of a near-death experience?

Only yesterday, the author of the wonderful “The Tourist Destination” had already sent some revealing vibes in that direction. But that was yesterday. That was when I still believed that I was going to discover something inspirational in one of the world’s most dramatic emergent megalopolis.

Today, faced with a sort of bureaucratic stupidity that was only a pale version of the dark reality in which I was about to immerse, I finally gave up on my strenuous efforts to potentially offer some perspective on what was going in this oily place. And the airplane tickets were already in my hands.

I don’t deny that the fascination will still be there for someone who is interested in how cities develop out of the chemistry of chaos – someone who is moved by how people actually survive and are creative in the midst of such chaos.

However, in some way, this is only another story in which failure is able to trigger a fair amount of reflection. Sometimes is indeed better to fail – or, as Seinfeld famously put it, it is wiser to say “I choose not to run.”

This is why I am now starving to hear what Mr. International Curator has to say about “The Future of Curating,” this coming Saturday, in Lisbon. Indeed, when the luxury of conspicuous cultural consumption will come to a moment of arrested development, what is to become of this nice activity of showing beautiful and intelligent things to the people?

There other good reasons to go to the beach, of course.

Some of these reasons come straight out of this wonderful and rather young profession of “curating.” Once I stood in front of a museum director and I had to tell him that I would rather go to the beach than to accept the despicable conditions that his stiff board was suggesting so as to organize an exhibition.

Happily, bygones are always bygones. Especially after a 45-minute fight with the Atlantic ocean. As another pop band sung, this is only life, and how to live it.

On The Road

After it opened in Porto to outrageous acclaim, the Habitar Portugal exhibition finally hits the international road. This is going to be short but sweet.

Following the London Festival of Architecture – in which I will be talking at RIBA’s Speakers Crescent this coming Sunday – the show will go to Macau where it will open on the 7^th of July.

In China’s booming Las Vegas HP 06/08 will be hosted by the Albergue SCM, where I will also talking on Saturday 10^th at 5pm. If you happen to be around on your way to the Expo 2010 Shangai…

Guess what I’m doing… #05

“What has made the Odyssey project different is to draw attention to the experimental, the undefined, the under-analysed. (…) The stories being produced – based on particular buildings or featuring architects – might   set one’s imagination going more effectively than other publications.”

As the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism left me quite satisfied by making “architecture fiction” central to one of their special projects, someone should inform the Biennale curator and audience that there is already a bookazine out there dedicated to “experimental” architectural fictions…

And that’s not the only arena where “architectural fiction” is coming up. Very soon there will be news of the 1st International Conference on Architecture and Fiction, which I have the pleasure to co-organize on occasion of the next Lisbon Architecture Triennale, at Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in October 2010. vdbsdzmfdmsnvmfn

With keynote speakers writers Alberto Manguel and Gonçalo M. Tavares, artist With keynote speakers writers Alberto Manguel and Gonçalo M. Tavares, artist Ângela Ferreira and architect Colin Fournier from Archigram already confirmed, the Call for Papers inviting contributions on this hot theme will soon be online…

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Beyond Again

As we were getting news of Beyond 01‘s award in the American Design Awards – a 2nd prize in book design inbetween 1415 global entries – Florian Mewes, the series graphic designer, was finishing this stunning cover for Beyond 02…

The current issue of Beyond is being launched next Thursday 19th, 6pm, within the International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam, at the Nai.

After Venice (with Yehuda Safran, Reed Krolloff, Shumon Basar and Map Office), after Harvard (with Eve Blau), after London (with Colin Fournier, Sam Jacob and Liam Young), it is my immense pleasure to announce that our first presentation in the Netherlands will consist of a reading of “Feast in A War Zone – A Palestin-ian Diary” by its author, the philosopher and writer Lieven de Cauter.

Contributors to this volume Emiliano Gandolfi, Markus Miessen and Marc Schuilenburg will also be present to enter the discussion on this issue.

The event is kindly welcomed by the IABR in its Open City Event Program and precedes Eyal Weizman‘s lecture on Forensic Architecture on the context of the REFUGE cluster curated by Philipp Misselwitz and Can Altay .

As for the contents of Values & Symptoms I will soon disclose a few goodies… dbvcmscsabmnbcmnadsb

Archives of Re-Incidence #03

I think it’s about time to say something more about the notion of Performance Architecture… Alas, this is the title of another of those curatorial projects that I was keeping on hold and that I’ve now decided to deliver “open-source”…

Perhaps this is another of those pedagogical stories about free-lance curating. The idea, originated during a discussion in Basel, was initially proposed to the then recently appointed direktorin of an Hamburg Triennale that I guess has itself disappeared.

The project was discussed with the CCA‘s Mirko Zardini, but there the recession put a halt to it. Then it got entangled into the internal politics of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and also there it was denied its coming into being…

Lately, it was also proposed for the Asturias’ Laboral, which seemed like quite an adequate venue for it, but after a warm welcome by Rosina Gómez-Baeza, silence from the institution became quite “deafening” (as we say in Portuguese politics).

As I believe there is a proper time for projects to make their impact, particularly in a world regulated by ever tighter trends & fads, I think it’s time for the idea to be exposed. Moreover, the term is coming up already in very diverse contexts, possibly making it dejá vu by the time anyone will accomplish a show on it… (Although, at some point, I am sure someone  will make an exhibition about it.)

The fact is, anyway, that one of the people who was present at the Basel discussion made it for herself and has managed to already create an event on the subject. And I’m glad she did. This was the Performing Architecture event last week at Madrid’s Matadero, as curated by Ariadna Cantis.

However, as you may read here at more length, this wasn’t exactly my idea of the notion of Performance Architecture…

Matadero’s event certainly addresses some of the protagonists I am looking at. But more than the performing arts, theatrical approach to enacting an architectural discourse within the city, I’m interested in the relationships between architecture and Performance Art.

Over the last two decades minimalism and pop art have influenced architecture with a delay of about 30 years. Now, it is the moment for the performance practices of the Seventies to make their comeback into the realm of architecture and urban intervention.

In its relation to art, architecture was quite in sync with the avant-gardes during the first decades of the XXth century, only to gain an increasing delay in regards to art’s progressive role after the Sixties. During the Sixties, even if marginally, there were still groups that were perfectly synchronized with the Pop movement, namely in the UK and Italy. Gordon Matta-Clarke, on the other hand, signals in the Seventies a definitive departure of the rebelling artist from architecture’s increasingly specialized and technicist realm.

When the Post-Modern movement explodes, architecture is certainly on the forefront… but as the leader of what Hal Foster called the movement’s reactionary side. Postmodernist architecture was regressive – and so were the immediate reactions to it. Decon is not much more than a return to Constructivism in philosopher’s garments, and even Rem Koolhaas is just cleverly –and retroactively– looking at the avant-gardes, from Melnikov right onto Superstudio.

Minimalism in architecture eventually carried out the same sort of retroactive move, and does it by looking back at the very last movement before the most progressive strain of Postmodern art appears in Rauschenberg and others.

Now, what I’m trying to get at here is the fact that, while Performance Architecture is also unconsciously looking back to art history, it does so onto an artistic movement that had a highly conscious political role. And this creates a difference.

While Minimalism in architecture was quickly devoid of its critical, perceptive overtones, the practice of Performance Architecture is actually retaining the social, political and “body” discourse that characterized the art movement.   Which is highly positive, and only possible because its protagonists are not yet totally immersed in the commercial drive of today’s architecture.

This phenomenon creates the other distinctive aspect of what I’m addressing here – specially when other notions of performance in architecture are coming up in recent discourse, albeit addressing the “performativity” of architecture while directing it to economical and disciplinary efficiency.

While I also refer to “performativity” in the text I am now releasing online, I do it to precisely keep that notion at bay. And that is one reason why what I’m saying here is quintessentially different from what is coming up in David Leatherbarrow’s “Architecture Oriented otherwise.”

The inaugurating book of the obviously welcomed “Writing Matters” collection –from that other Ivy League publisher a.k.a Princeton Architectural Press– delivers the concept of analyzing architecture as a performative device rather than objectual production.

But while Leatherbarrow’s proposition is interesting and reflects important shifts in the way we should regard architecture, it also shows the typical flaw of current American theory.

While the notions put forward there are supposedly progressive, they also contains in themselves the trigger for their own “happy consumption” within a market model and an architectural regime that remains unquestioned…