INTRODUCTION

The “Photography and architecture”triennial is organized within the cultural missions taken on by the faculties of architecture of La Cambre/Horta and the Free University of Brussels.

This framework is important. When a faculty of architecture decides to organize a photography exposition, itinvites its community and visitorsto exercise their view.

Indeed the educational mission of its faculty consists primarilyin the development of a consciousness according to which architecture is, first and foremost, the reading and understanding of a specific situation before it is interpreted and transformed.

Reading, understanding and interpreting that is to say “to represent the world to one’s self”.

To transform,that is to say, to shape proposals of worlds where existences will be arranged, as Nicolas Hannequin likes to say. The famous American architect Louis Kahn speaks of architecture as “a world within the world”. In this way, photography is architecture as it is constituted of an inhabited space, constructed by the sense of an informed view. These marvelous disciplines share the fact that they can only be generous propositions of singular realities and that they are to be experienced far more than they are trying to prove something, that they represent traces of this fabulous adventure of the human mind. We would like one of the characteristics of our triennial to be that architecturebe essentially evoked beyond its formal value and its esthetic dimension so that it may invest its humanized layers, invisible, coded, mapped, its values of exchange, non-marketable, the sense which it contributes to establish with its signs, in its more anonymous reality, more day to day, the furthest from its status as an object. This “sensibility” will certainly contribute to our choices.

THEME : ARCHITECTURE FOR SOMETHING…

«  …Dans les palais que j’explorai imparfaitement, l’architecture était privée d’intention. On n’y rencontrait que des couloirs sans issue, hautes fenêtres inaccessibles, portes colossales donnant sur une cellule ou sur un puits, incroyables escaliers inversés, aux degrés et à la rampe tournés vers le bas. D’autres, fixés dans le vide à une paroi monumentale, sans aboutir nulle part, s’achevaient, après deux ou trois paliers, dans la ténèbre supérieure des coupoles. (…) Je pensai à un monde sans mémoire, sans durée ; j’examinai la possibilité d’un langage qui ignorerait les substantifs, un langage de verbes impersonnels et d’épithètes indéclinables. »

Jorge Luis Borges, « L’Immortel », in L’ALEPH, éditions Gallimard, collection l’imaginaire, 1977, pages 23-27

While desperately trying to think of a deliberately and absolutely useless space, Georges Perec was forced to conclude that in the acts and the constructions of mankind, it is probably impossible to get rid of functions, rhythms, habits, necessity.

Forever, within the universe and the world,and faced with their complexity, man cannot accept that he cannot grasp the whole of time and space which surround him. He carries out acts, significant or not, that are as many attempts, hypothesis, conjectures, to understand, to give one’s self the impression of taming a supposed reality, when it is not about creating a parallel one.

Clarify, update, discover, gather, structure. Build coherences, establish balances, create priorities. Declare, denounce, proclaim, answer to. Create worlds, with their history, their grammar, their codes, their imperious necessities.

Mortal, and for that reason anxious, this passing man has taken it upon himself to attest that, one day, he has also masteredreality, this “particular case of the possible” as Bergson would say. It is essential to the Meaning of his presence in life, a meaning which is imperative to name so that he might distinguish himself individually or collectively. It is the imperious necessity, or illusion, that he must identify that which makes him different from others, what defines him in his relation to the world.

At the heart of his meandering subconscious, at the innermost of the codes and norms of the systems he generates to organize his own specificity, man always nourishes the obsession of presentation and representation. Through a multitude of diverse deeds, he imports the movement of his thoughts and the expressions of his sensibility to the heart of matter. This matter is both the matrix and the form. He builds places that are as many spaces where he can read his speculations, his certitudes and his injunctions. They create nouns so that the verbsof his language do not remain impersonal, norun-itemized epithets. Subject of his own sentences or that of a world where situations are infinitely reproduced (as if to contradict the linear nature of time), man establishes acts by doing “things”.

Create things to stabilize, to organize, to incarnate, to render visible the world within the world : the subject of his objects ! In this process of reification, man, architect or not, uses among other things architecture. He uses its codes, its rules, its manners, its material, its orders, its scales to mobilize importance, to build connections, elevate values.

« Nous avons tendance à préférer tout ce qui se présente à nous avec la force organique d’un monde, et pas seulement la pure présence d’un objet, même s’il est beau. Nous sommes reconnaissants envers celui qui est capable de mettre en place des mondes. Ce sont des assurances contre le chaos, ce sont des organisations salvatrices du réel. » (1)

From vernacular architecture to more scholarly architecture, from the primal gesture to the most abstract elaboration, from mystification to transgression, man lives in a worldhe tattoos withsymbols. He questions his identifications and composes his belonging. Architecture tells something, something of man and his systems.

Architecture for something.

The imaginary is at work, to realize an innocuous dream, to answer to an impelling necessity, to impose with violence or grace an unremitting force, to simply try to make it, in the best possible way.

From the simplicity of a Dogon house to the structural complexity of a gothic cathedral, architecture says the unity shaped by the earth, the sky, the divine and mortals. In other places and other times, it tells of the splendor and power of political, economic or religious forces, enlightened or tyrannical, emancipated or oppressive, immanent or transcendent. It unveils singular visions nourished by the promise of poetic dreams, unless it is propagatingthe standardized illusion of consumerist bliss and its formatted postures. It answers to the flawless scientific organization of its industrialized utility and its relations with finance. It expresses its will to blend into a landscape or to dominate it. It speaks of social control or civil disobedience. It exposes the chaotichandiwork of precarious survival, opposes public and private, the restrictive functionality of deployed appropriation, and dares transgression or interference. It stands by its hypertrophy, and claims its grimaces, gives indications of its rapport to madness and disease. It institutes its ambitions of eternity, babbles or softly whistles the fragility of its ephemeral nature. Architecture, sometimes, surrenders, in every sense of the term…

Vernacular habitat, research center, abandoned factory, suburban house, roman monastery, urban squat, bunker, museum, psychiatric hospital, ocean resort, Foxconn workshop-city, shopping center, theatre, vegetable garden, annex, avenue, tower, bar, slum, motel, amusement park, unemployment office, ball room, train station, peoples palace, ruin…

The list is infinite, the inventory utopian.

As many nounsthat personalize verbs and itemize epithets of a language, architecture, which documents the nature of reality ; of an author, the architect, who is both judge and judged, who ”would not only be the one who finds the strength to express himself against all others but the one who, while expressing himself, finds the correct distance to tell the truth of the system from which he is tearing away” (2) or that which he claims to be, consciously or unconsciously ; of a discipline, again architecture, which gives direction and sometimes situates man at the center of a world full of symbols but more often “ exactly in the middle, at this connection point between realities, disjoined spaces and times ; as a smuggler…passing by…”(3)

Marc Mawet

architecte,

chargé de cours à la faculté d’architecture de l’université libre de Bruxelles,

commissaire de la triennale « photographie et architecture »

(1) Alessandro Baricco, « NEXT », Albin Michel, 2002, imprimé à Saint-Amand-Montrond, page 60

(2) Serge Daney, cité par Pascale Cassagnau, « Chantal Akerman, une action restreinte », in L’Art Même, n°55, 2ème trimestre 2012, Chronique des arts plastiques de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, page 9

(3) Christoph Kihm, « Jeremy Deller, penser avec le populaire », in Art Press n°310, mars 2005, page 48