‘wall sandwich’ - The architectural gesture in art practice from destruction to non-construction

This project uses and researches a particular art practice and its works. In it 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 such architectural art practice as a mode of having knowledge through the figure of non-construction. As ‘creative work’ and ‘text’, in a confluent screening of films and live broadcasts in the Cinema Car as the base of encounter and conversation, and in a confluent writing of quotations and comments along practical, philosophical, and theoretical positions, it addresses and makes the gesture and term of non-construction, now employed in new locations and formulations, available for uses and debates on and in current practices and works of art. 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, accompanied by modern and contemporary thinkers and practitioners in art and architecture, often set in unexpected dialogue. The work is a reflection on praxis. The Study performs a reduction of architectural art practice to discursive practice, supposedly 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 back such practice to architectural art practice probing the strategy of voiding as the discursive architectural gesture of encounter. Building Cinema, finally, actually building films and cinemas, reclaims the practice of filmic documentation as such a discursive architectural art practice. Maintained in an economy of overspending, whose aim is not production but an understanding beyond it, the material 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