The notion of "expenditure" as conceptualized by Georges Bataille is interesting for reading this accumulation. Bataille argued that societies should move beyond a solely utilitarian perspective, embracing an understanding of excess, waste, and the non-utilitarian aspects of human existence. In this view, the gift, he writes, “must be considered as a loss and thus as a partial destruction, since the desire to destroy is in part transferred on to the recipient.”
In order to read the useless outgrowth that the landscape accumulated, rather than focusing on its re-use or implementation, we might want value the amount of soil which is buried and had been sacrificed and the waste it created not as a missed opportunity or reminiscent of a successful past, rather in the idea of destruction of a system they represent. The act of loss without a return becomes fruitful to the extent it questions the modality and processes of production and value-conversion. In a system that has been constantly pairing loss with acquisitions, the territory was traded in the name of something else: cycles of consumptions eroded the soil, the seemingly unlimited emptiness, privatized for growth, now it is the building, the ruin, which is standing still, “wasted” and which shall be donated to the uncertainty: an irreversible concrete footprint is an impulse of immortality. The notion of expenditure and the sacrifice around that is about loss and waste for the sake of it: yet it is the transitory state that they define which is valuable, as it has the capacity to recognize the self and the body at play as an effect of the other and in general in its relation to the system in which the body is inserted.
Architecture organizes the space through which bodies move, and as such, bodies perceive architectural structures to be static, while they move in space through time. Architecture codifies systems, and remains: its timing often does not correspond or struggles to adapt to transformations, hence it keeps on shaping the body, which denies its radical and destructive spirit. As vacancy spreads across the territory, the notion of its sacrifice allows us to turn this around, in the name of the body that defines and perceives the space. This allows us to bring the static immanence of architecture down into its actual fragility, as its codes, rules and liturgies 'make sense' in certain moments and fall apart in others, leaving behind a massive amount of waste as witnesses. One shall then ‘sacrifice’ these leftovers, and by doing so, define them as they are: as waste. Not as useless from a productive point of view, simply as a void to metabolize and liberate. I would like to read this act of destruction as their sacrifice, for its capacity to eradicate the leftover spatial relationships and the social order they govern, destroying not the architecture itself but the architectural organization of bodies in the space, rendering the space, in return, as formless. The space of this factory shall be the test for this sacrifice. And it is in the most archetypal elements that such narrative shall unfold: the bonfire, the body, the palimpsest.
I'd Rather be eaten, July 2023, Villa Filanda Antonini, Treviso, Italy, Photography by Federico Marin
The notion of "expenditure" as conceptualized by Georges Bataille is interesting for reading this accumulation. Bataille argued that societies should move beyond a solely utilitarian perspective, embracing an understanding of excess, waste, and the non-utilitarian aspects of human existence. In this view, the gift, he writes, “must be considered as a loss and thus as a partial destruction, since the desire to destroy is in part transferred on to the recipient.”
In order to read the useless outgrowth that the landscape accumulated, rather than focusing on its re-use or implementation, we might want value the amount of soil which is buried and had been sacrificed and the waste it created not as a missed opportunity or reminiscent of a successful past, rather in the idea of destruction of a system they represent. The act of loss without a return becomes fruitful to the extent it questions the modality and processes of production and value-conversion. In a system that has been constantly pairing loss with acquisitions, the territory was traded in the name of something else: cycles of consumptions eroded the soil, the seemingly unlimited emptiness, privatized for growth, now it is the building, the ruin, which is standing still, “wasted” and which shall be donated to the uncertainty: an irreversible concrete footprint is an impulse of immortality. The notion of expenditure and the sacrifice around that is about loss and waste for the sake of it: yet it is the transitory state that they define which is valuable, as it has the capacity to recognize the self and the body at play as an effect of the other and in general in its relation to the system in which the body is inserted.
Architecture organizes the space through which bodies move, and as such, bodies perceive architectural structures to be static, while they move in space through time. Architecture codifies systems, and remains: its timing often does not correspond or struggles to adapt to transformations, hence it keeps on shaping the body, which denies its radical and destructive spirit. As vacancy spreads across the territory, the notion of its sacrifice allows us to turn this around, in the name of the body that defines and perceives the space. This allows us to bring the static immanence of architecture down into its actual fragility, as its codes, rules and liturgies 'make sense' in certain moments and fall apart in others, leaving behind a massive amount of waste as witnesses. One shall then ‘sacrifice’ these leftovers, and by doing so, define them as they are: as waste. Not as useless from a productive point of view, simply as a void to metabolize and liberate. I would like to read this act of destruction as their sacrifice, for its capacity to eradicate the leftover spatial relationships and the social order they govern, destroying not the architecture itself but the architectural organization of bodies in the space, rendering the space, in return, as formless. The space of this factory shall be the test for this sacrifice. And it is in the most archetypal elements that such narrative shall unfold: the bonfire, the body, the palimpsest.
I'd Rather be eaten, July 2023, Villa Filanda Antonini, Treviso, Italy, Photography by Federico Marin