This project aims at using and researching a work of art in which political and critical architectural strategies converge—convergences currently researched, generally, in cultural fields as modes of countering dominant techniques of governance. It investigates and, crucially, enacts and embodies architectural art practice as a critical mode of having knowledge through the figure of non-construction.
In a confluent writing of quotations and comments along practical, philosophical and theoretical positions, it addresses and makes the term of non-construction, now employed in new formulations and locations, available for debates on and in the current work of art. As ‘creative work’ and ‘text’ and their mutual engagement, it constructs, deconstructs, reconstructs, and non-constructs non-construction.
The work draws on diverse fields spanning prehistoric life and art, the relation between art and life since the 1970s, discursive art practice, documentation, cinematographic and theatrical practices, curatorial practices, the relation between ideology, infrastructure and architecture, continental philosophy, and current practices of theory. Particular attention has been paid to the work of Georges Bataille and Walter Benjamin, with the help of modern and contemporary thinkers and practitioners in art and architecture, often set in unexpected post-acéphale dialogue.
The work is also a reflection on and use of praxis. The Study performs a reduction of architectural art practice to discursive practice, which supposedly is the legitimate contender of contemporary art, revealing the architectural typology of the study as a spatial and material factor of discourse, applicable to the current problematic. A Voiding draws such practice back onto architectural art practice probing the strategy of voiding as the discursive architectural gesture of encounter. Building Cinema, finally, by actually building films and cinemas, reclaims the practice of filmic documentation as such a discursive architectural art practice.
Held together in an economy of overspending, whose aim is not production but an understanding beyond it, the material brought into play offers artists the possibility of encounter along architectural strategies of non-construction. It also contributes to architectural discourse offering new possibilities for engaging with architecture through the work of art’s transgression of construction’s ideological constrains.
