There are several questions at stake in your provocation, but something that is very important for us and that could help us begin responding is that we don’t want to make too easy a connection between our own experiences living abroad and the topics discussed in the Triennale. Also, we would like to unfold some of the notions you mention: instead of taking them as stable and fixed, we consider its unpacking to be critical for the definition of current constructions of belonging.

Each of us was brought to the US for different reasons that range from our interest in continuing our training in other academic and professional environments as well as questions of affection or the attraction of various imaginaries of what living abroad in a different continent could entail. As you can imagine, reasons behind the decision to leave home are always diverse and never reducible to one axis. While many of us moved to the US at the start of the crises, our plans and desires were forged amidst the construction bubble. Our motivations were far from a mere desire to leave the crisis behind. You have to remember that the US had been equally affected by the crisis in 2008, with a daily increase of the layoff rate. What back then was not a strategic move, might seem so right now, as the crises has become harsher and longer in Southern Europe.

It would be also difficult to reduce our personal stories and professional projects only to our passport. Even if the five of us are Spanish, each of us deals with different conditions determined by diverse visas, and its associated permissions and restrictions. As for of many other young citizens, our professional expertise, personal projects and experiences are grounded in a community that expands through many countries and sensitivities, and which is difficult to identify with any particular national profile. Carrying a Spanish passport might not imply that Spain is the only place where you belong (and not even where you have most of your belongings, which each of us manages in a different way).

And still, far from celebrating any nomadic form of life or an idealized cosmopolitan community, the project we are pursuing for Oslo takes very seriously that not everybody circulates in the global context voluntarily and in the same way. That diversity is the reason why we are very cautious to separate our own experience from the broad range of situations addressed by the curatorial framework of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. There are currently 230 million migrants around the globe and each year 1 billion tourists float worldwide, creating a condition that has destabilized what we understand by the term ‘residence.’ But what each person calls home (both within their domestic settings and in the spaces defined by national boundaries) is very different. It is the redefinition of the space of residence and its architectures that we are looking for in the Triennale, titled “After Belonging.”

This approach to the question of residence is far from accepting the atomization of individuals. Quite the contrary, it assumes residence as a reality shaped by economic, cultural, technological and social processes that have very little to do with what one could call the private sphere, as the naturalized space for the individual. The identification of residence with the private is a recent, dangerous connection that we are not willing to accept so easily. Our concern with critically rethinking “belonging” is that, in addressing this very topic rather than accepting social bonds as constrained to traditional familial structures and national “imagined communities,” it will also appeal to different meanings that encapsulate heterogeneous forms of collectivity. While there is an obvious rise of nationalist and religious movements in our times (with which the project is also concerned), our proposal for the Triennale tries to identify the architectures at stake in contemporary forms of being together and belonging, with its spatial configurations, its aesthetic agendas, its furnishings, its markets, its territories and its technologies.

Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco
Ignacio González Galán
Carlos Mínguez Carrasco
Alejandra Navarrete Llopis
Marina Otero Verzier
(After Belonging Agency)

The members of your collective are all part of the recent Spanish diaspora, highly educated young professionals, who because of the economic crisis moved out of Spain, seeking for work or pursuing an academic career. Of course the set of skills and probably also the passports that you carry facilitated for you the entry in highly competitive systems, frequently in the US, where key positions in institutions and schools are occupied by many of your fellow citizens. The topic that you propose for the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016, where you have been selected as curators, “In Residence”, makes references to singular nodes where the experience of transit and mobility are is articulated. I truly appreciate the spirit of your proposal. On the other hand, it seems to accept the reduction of the collective to the sum of atomized and separated individuals: in that sense your emphasis on the residential is revealing. Do you think that there might be instead actions capable of generating new collective articulations? There seems to be a contradiction in your proposal: residence recalls family and small nuclei, while instead you also employ the world “people, which connects back to another political lineage. I am interested to know how you foresee the possibility to create “people”, an element which id equipped with some degree of collective identity and common objectives out of migrants, when the factors of nation and territory are absent.

Fabrizio Gallanti (Via Donato Bramante V, II piano)

Let´s start saying that I don’t know if it would make sense to discuss if architecture is an artistic discipline or what are the requirements for a discipline to became art. I definitely think there are many shared points between art and architecture and their relations have been longer discussed. However, this is probably more of an epistemological issue which I don’t think is the issue of your thoughts.

What I find interesting to think about is if architecture is really finding its way of being exhibited, produced and legitimized in the last years in the art or around the economy of the art world.

I think both artists, and architects are today desperate to re-define what they are and for who they are working, more than actually thinking about what they are doing.
Excuse me if I turn around your question (which  probably means that it’s a round trip)…In fact I really think architects are trying to exhibit their work and abilities more and more in art spaces, or under art biennials etc. In some cases, under the impossibility of build “buildings” and aware of an art world, hungry and looking for other experiences (no matter what), many architects have found their way of growing up under the umbrella of art institutions.  Many architecture exhibitions are no more just a representation in small scale of built projects (and less if you don’t even have one) or photographs of the projects (only if these are taking in an super smart and intelectual way for and architecture photographer that also is flying between to be an artist or a photographer). The production of 1:1 scale is also becoming old fashioned. Today architects build abstract and complex installations and like to be interviewed by art critics/curators and philosophers. So, the philosophical and conceptual approach of the practice is getting more and more important than the practice per se. That’s not to say that architecture is not a tough discipline -it always has been- but now we see how architecture needs to be expressed in a way that comes really close to the language of art criticism.

However, in terms of the art institutions,  I find some danger in the proliferation of architecture exhibitions (including in my own experiments)… Sometimes architects that try to make a complete abstraction of their work fall into a cliched installation that shows a complete blindness about Art History. However and because they are under the umbrella of being architects, they are allowed to repeat an experiment in project that has been already resolved/shown by artists many years ago. Another option is to establish complicated and very well designed diagrams explaining research-base projects. Sometimes it is more like an exercise in graphic design than an authentic architectural project or even a serious and accurate research.

It is the same, for instance, with underground cinema… today many filmmakers are showing their work in art spaces since there is not “enough room” for them in most of the film festivals. So yes, the art space is the space for the contamination and freedom…. Freedom and of course, a lot of “bullshit”.

Also, and just as a little comment, to jump into the art space is much easier than having an architectural office. An architect, once he has finished his studies, needs to work for many years until becoming comfortable with the idea of having their own office. Some times it’s not even an economical issue but really a kind of code or rule. However, an artist becomes an artist immediately… even if I´m completely convinced that this kind of rushing usually ends up as a complete disaster…

Curators are funnier than clients, I guess. So, just as the isolated and pristine space of the gallery space, or even the public landscape of the art biennial has become the perfect space for the architect to establish his trade mark space for architecture…,  the art world also gives them a kind of legitimacy. However, some architects that basically exhibit or work under the art umbrella are criticized by their colleagues. I guess it’s the same between architect/academics versus architects/builders…

For instance… I prefer to work in terms of people with good ideas and shared opinion and see how they can work in a cross disciplinary way, learning from each other. That doesn’t mean that the artist comes with the ideas, the curator writes the text and conceptualizes through theory the artists practice and architects design the museography! It’s really a collaboration from the beginning, as a shared platform of thinking. It is not very defined yet, but as I said before, people don’t like to define themselves any more…

Visual art is probably the most contaminated, permissive and invaded of all the disciplines, and artists are the most adventurous, trying a bit of everything, sometimes without even thinking about the consequences. In my own work that it is pretty much related with performance and time-base practices, it is very easy to see how dance choreographers are working in the white cube… also how music or dance scores has been fetichazed in a very dangerous way becoming art works…(… quoting musician Charles Curtis, this is a dangerous thing since scores are primarily instructions, and as instructions they have to been interpreted and translated). However the opposite is even harder… I’m not saying that artists are not becoming architects, or work in the black box or trying to write an opera. But when they do, the people from that discipline (including architecture) find these experiments as almost a “profanation”… So yes, artists work with many tools from other disciplines, but they are “not allowed” to really jump into other territories that easily…

All the best,
Ruth

It’s been nearly a year since I received your invitation letter to contribute to your project, The Republic of Letters. At that time you were contemplating the idea of Europe, or rather the state of Europe as a community of fragmented national states seeking cohesive form in the face of irresolvable differences amongst its component parts. I was immediately attracted to the suggestiveness of your deployment and reanimation of Voltaire’s 18th century discursive project: “The Republic of Letters,” founded as an intellectual community of correspondents across national and international frontiers who came together to debate key questions and concepts of their time. That time was the period of the European Enlightenment, that bequeathed us many of the issues and questions we are still debating today. Through their letters, discussions and disputes arose, ideas were telegraphed in ways that defied both conventions of translation and transposition. By engaging in wide ranging discussions and debates across great distances, with differences of language, culture, politics, economic conditions, intellectual traditions, temporality, and vastness of spatial separation, “The Republic of Letters” in many ways anticipated what we would call today “a virtual community” by means of an analog social media.

Nearly thirty years ago, as her conservative government was on the verge of completely dismantling the British welfare state that developed in the wake of the industrial revolution, Margaret Thatcher, the late British prime minister, had famously declared in an interview that “there is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women.” Is the human community really composed only of “individual men and women” as the late prime minister claimed? If we follow her reasoning, what can we say then about your idea of a community of correspondents? And what constitutes for you the idea of a “community?” If The Republic of Letters, like your idea of Europe, imagines broader sets of social, political, and cultural affiliations, beyond the standard articulations of stable homogenous national borders that currently characterize the xenophobic tendencies and asymmetric economic relations of Europe’s rightwing politics, the question is how might we think of the current state of global social relations in the current crisis.

Our correspondence from a year ago has since shifted from these discussions to issues of economic relations, in fact, to Karl Marx’s analysis and dissection of Capital. When I invited you to contribute to All the World’s Futures the international exhibition of the 56th Biennale di Venezia, I was especially interested in how, through your project “Republic of Letters” you might conceive of a project of annotation on Marx’s Das Kapital. You accepted the challenge, but with a justifiably skeptical position on the social existence of those you referred to as the key protagonists of Das Kapital. You wanted to base your inquiry into Capital by constructing a kind of dramatis personae of Das Kapital extracting characters from the book in order to dramatize the dissolution of the kind of society Marx imagined in the current state of neo-liberal capitalism. You rightly asked whether such characters of Das Kapital, such as the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the worker, etc. exist as they did in Marx’s time.

You have proposed a project on the figuration of Capital, to construct a Republic of Letters in order to not only engage in the annotation, but to think through Capital. You want to begin by reconstructing, or shall we say resurrecting “figures of Capital.” Who in your view are the figures of Capital today? Like many complex concepts, Capital remains elusive especially when its analysis runs up against the old conservatism of the wisdom of markets and of the economic freedom of Thatcher’s “individual men and women.” Against this resistance, can current conditions of Capital be represented? You are trying to imagine new figures of capital, in doing so, how do you imagine them to be “pictured,” to use a term closer to art? Problems of representation of capital have been a serious issue amongst radical thinkers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Bertholt Brecht, each of whom presented us two sets of illuminating aporias with regards to “picturing” conditions of capital. Eisenstein in his critique of Fritz Lang’s film Dr. Mabuse, suggested that a stock exchange cannot be represented with an image or photograph of the stock exchange because a picture of the scene tells you nothing of the movements and conditions of capital. To capture the true image of capital and its function within the stock exchange he proposed the concept of “dialectical montage” constituted by thousands of little details.

Brecht pretty much summarized this skepticism, by stating that a photograph of the interior of Krupp or AEG factory expresses nothing about what goes on inside the factory. His precise articulation is stated below: “The situation has become so complicated because the simple ‘reproduction of reality’ says less than ever about that reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or AEG reveals almost nothing about these institutions. Reality as such has slipped into the domain of the functional. The reification of human relations, the factory, for example, no longer discloses those relations. So there is indeed ‘something to construct’, something ‘artificial’, ‘invented’. But the old concept of art, derived from experience, is obsolete. For those who show only the experiential aspect of reality do not reproduce reality itself. It is simply no longer experienced as a totality. But speaking in this way, we speak about an art with a completely different function in social life–that of depicting reality.”

This impossibility of representation weighs like a burden on our project. Between you and me, we are facing a series of contradictions with regards to representing Capital; and finding in that representation an expressive instrument that can point us towards the possibility of the emancipation of the figures of Capital. This preoccupation is a central concern of the exhibition I have conceived in Venice. It is my hope that the opening of the Tomorrow’s far flung Republic of Letters will somehow reanimate Eisenstein’s concept of “dialectical montage” as a way to enable us to Reread Capital in the face of current economic, cultural, ideological, and political tendencies.

I look forward to hearing from you and I await the beginning of our correspondence.

Yours, as ever
Okwui

I hope this letter finds you well.
Pier Paolo Tamburelli suggested to discuss the fact that architecture is becoming more and more an artistic practice.
Is this a fact really? And what do we talk about when we say “artistic practice”?
It seems that the underlying idea is the artist as a romantic hero dedicated to creating an oevre detached from the constraints of everyday life.
I would rather say that artists are more and more involved in other practices such design, architecture, curating, research, archives and the like.
So it is the other way around actually: art is becoming more and more an architectural practice.
Still it is also true we are facing a situation where architects are selling themselves as heroes, unfortunately without any irony though. They sell images with a veil of populistic cynicism.
As images become increasingly important today, the starchitect wants to be a 20th Century artist hero while cutting edge artistic and architectural practice is moving actually exactly in the opposite direction: towards an understanding of relations and contexts, away from individualistic self-expression.

Best,
Simona

I am unable to imagine a place that would exist only for artists.
I don’t understand the meaning of the concept, perhaps because I have trouble seeing artists as a concrete group. That doesn’t mean that I deny the pertinence of them being called artists, and of course it doesn’t mean that I deny that artists exist.
Most probably, Europe is a kind of abstraction of that nature.

Venice is the first European city I visited outside of France.
I think that Venice heavily influenced my perception of Europe as a group of cities connected to one another by economic interests. Those economic interests create a context where there is exchange between people, a vector for cultural exchange.
When I think of Europe, I think of fluidity, wealth, festivity, but also fleeing, flooding, inequality, crossed borders and jam-packed boats. (I remember the first time I heard the expression “boat people”: it was in Venice, in reference to the vaporetto.)
A certain je ne sais quoi of Venice is found in New York. For sure, Europe’s common culture is much more discernible as soon as you leave its shores.
It’s like observing a country from an airplane, or like that drawing for The New Yorker by Saul Steinberg (View of the World from 9th Avenue) where other continents are just little lumps in the distance.

In many instances and ways, the term Europe is hackneyed in New York. It wasn’t until I got to New York that I realized through my relationships the profundity of my friendship with Germans, my immense complicity with Italians, my natural affinities with the Polish and the Portuguese, and how I share my taste for art criticism and the art of conversation with the British.

Camille Henrot

In researching the logic behind the assessment of the designs submitted for the new European banknotes in 1999, two of the guidelines in the European Central Bank’s contest brief were particularly interesting to me:

• The designs had to ensure gender equality and avoid national bias.
• The banknotes had to be immediately recognizable as European both within the European Union and beyond it. Therefore, the European Union’s flag or stars had to be depicted, and in general the designs’ themes had to convey a sense of unity among the peoples and countries of Europe.

It would seem that these guidelines confirm what Pier Paolo and Sophye were trying to argue: there is a lack of European figures or symbols that can purport to represent all so-called Europeans and at the same time be recognisable as European outside Europe’s borders.

In my opinion, there is also another aspect that makes the task of finding good design solutions in this case more difficult: currency is one of the last means by which economic assets and citizenship are tied to a recognizable set of national values, but at the same time we live in a globalized context.
Recently the Central Bank of Norway announced two winning proposals for the design of the new Norwegian banknotes, one for the front of the bills and another for the back. While the front reassures Norway’s citizenry with its typically Nordic motives, the other side displays a very contemporary and rather unusual approach compared to the traditional design of banknotes. Snøhetta, the studio that submitted this beautiful, pixelated, abstract, almost impersonal design, explained the idea by saying: “Our cubical pattern first of all represents pixels, our times’ visual language.”

I always thought that banknotes should address identity, evoking or drawing upon the physical appearance of a territory, from its geological features to its cartographic representation, and upon the population that resides there, from its timeline of shared history to its prominent figures and achievements. As far as I am aware, pixels are representative only of a certain kind of media – the computer and other screen-based technologies – that almost every country in the world uses.

In the light of this, could it be said that language (in this case, visual language) is becoming more important, shareable and understandable than the specific content it is used to convey? And is globalization blurring the entire heritage of symbols that were once representative of local communities?

Elisa Pasqual

Some years ago, the poet Michel Deguy observed how the 20th century began with its future, “futurississimo”. Because of our anachronism, the appellation “futurism” retroactively dominated all Europe in the ’00s. Could Europe have happened only for artists?
Michel Deguy asked this question in 1986, not too long before the new ’00s, which were symbolically and chronologically the beginning of the 21st century.
You being a young artist in the United States, accepted as a European, I would like to ask you the same question, slightly modified: Could you describe the Europe that there was for you, if indeed there was one?

Federico Nicolao

I believe I am better known for the failure of two projects that I consider to be important still today – the Zen quarter in Palermo and the University of Calabria – than for other projects such as the Bicocca quarter in Milan, my stadiums in Spain and North Africa, the opera theatre in Aix-en-Provence or the residential quarter in Pujiang, China, to name a few, whose completion came about in a positive manner amid normal difficulties.
Then there are the competitions that I justly or unjustly lost.
I have written a great deal about the mostly political reasons for my built failures and the ones I designed but that remained unbuilt. I can send you some of these writings.
The most interesting ones might be the musings on the buildings where we admit to having made mistakes, either in the general layout or in details, which sometimes adopted solutions that did not correspond to the intentions of what should have been proposed.
It’s up to you to decide which of these different reflections is the most stimulating.

Kind regards,
Vittorio Gregotti