Page 175 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

ARChITECTURE AND ITS DOUBLE BRUCE BÉGOUT
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“All urban life aspires to this condition: flux, pastiche”. — Iain Sinclair, London Orbital
Mouth watering. The urban menu parades by in 4x3, striking letterings in kindergarten colours: Arby’s (WE HAVE THE MEATS), Dairy Queen, Wendy’s (CHOOSE FRESH), Chipotle (GET CHORIZO’D), Cocktail’s Videogame, El Rancho Motel, WORLD PREMIERE, SALES 80%. Like a book or an advertising leaflet stuck on the windshield, with a pleasant feeling of movement, effortlessly turning from one item to the next. The suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee (USA), just like anywhere else in the world: poor, banal, sad hyper-outskirts, mostly dull and vulgar (hard to translate [into other languages]: roughly vernacular/popular, and so familiar it goes unnoticed), where the neo-capitalist melting-pot intersperses commercial solicitations, affordable entertainment with ease of access, and all FOR ONLY $ 8.99.
We venture into the Centennial Park seeking a less brand-saturated horizon, along with some fresh air and green grass. We slow down in our rented car, letting it gently glide along slight bends in the road, and then suddenly, like a weird vision out of our memory or our imagination, IT emerges over across the median strip. What is IT? It’s what my memory, chock-full of millions of images and narratives, swiftly identifies as the Parthenon! WTF!? Is this the one from Athens, the temple dedicated to the glory of Athena Polias, in front of which Pericles walked and talked, the same one that later became a gunpowder magazine during the war against the Turks, the very same one we see in so many postcards and in Martin Parr’s photographs, so full of British irony? Yes it’s the very same one in all its majesty, better than the original itself, more like its true Platonic idea, rid of all slag, having descended upon this earth to say hi to the sensible world.
Surprise-effect gone, we park at the huge empty parking lot surrounding the building. Everything is car-friendly here; you never have to walk a long way from your car’s door to your final destination. Doubts and stupefaction vanish at a few metres distance. It is indeed the same building. Massive, impressive. We slowly go around it, all the time enthralled by a troubling impression of sameness and otherness. Punctuated by the sculpted metopes, the long colonnade graciously encircles the