How to work in your time to be in your time? As a warm-up to Institution Building, (exhibition opening end of august in CIVA), MISANTHROPOZINE plots a 60-hour performance. The performance was triggered by Mondial Festival, an event by SUPERSTUDIO and 9999 at Florence club Space Electronic in 1971. This festival was a pedagogic experiment, an alternative school of architecture, that saw the club transformed into an underground forest with trees, a lake, rocks, and bathed in projections and sounds. Fifty years later, we need alternative systems, spaces and experiences for school-making and sharing also. But what is there to share? And what kind of architect can we become?
The performance is diffused online via twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/sleepersdreamers
Watch the performance (click here).
The protagonists of SLEEPERS/DREAMERS will lock themselves in a green-keyed primitive hut, and accelerate the coming of age of a new architect. On a landscape sprinkled with post-millennial souvenirs and SUPERLACK modules, the SLEEPERS/DREAMERS try to live for three days and two nights, live-streamed to a remote audience. During those 60 hours, they search for connections or updates of SUPERSTUDIO’s radical search for life beyond and despite of architecture and its nurturing systems. Trapped in a loop of oversaturated images, positions, beliefs and agendas, the SLEEPERS/DREAMERS must find ways to work. Crushed on the left and cuddled to death on the right by agents of self-referential orthodoxies, they lay paralyzed. Perhaps the only thing they need is sleep?
And as our dummies doze off into voxel dreamlands, they hold tight to their screens, airing a snowflakey goo of tutorials, videos and guest appearances to you, dear onlookers. Caring for avocados, adjusting ring lights, idling to the tender voicings of old sweet ceremonies, radiating a present but dreaming beyond. Will you join the SLEEPERS/DREAMERS, broadcasting our slow surrender to the obsessions, fears, hopes and secrets that come with living and working in a duck-faced, caffeinated culture?
PS: the après-ski of SLEEPERS/DREAMERS is plotted also: the chromakey vessel used as the performance’s incubator will transform into NO CLUB, a members only, cool-critical whisky bar. Keep an eye out for details on how and when to enter, for more spirited, collective sleeping and dreaming.
The Sleepers / Dreamers project was conceived as part of Superstudio Migrazioni, a CIVA exhibition curated by Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou.
