Page 178 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

178 ¡ÚNETE! JOIN US! JORDI COLOMER
explosion –, that marketing’s fairy-godmothers don’t want to further trouble them by adding up to the pile of confusion, and instead entice them with clear, identifiable visions – clichés in the proper sense of the term – that appease their overheated minds. In the midst of the suburban jungle emerges an Egyptian pyramid, an Easter Island statue, a Venetian palace, etc., namely, anything that can be found in globalised memory, which thus operates like a sort of personal bank account from which we can endlessly withdraw funds. The effect is instantaneous: recognition and adherence. For quite obviously, therein lies the key: to create the minimal attachment immediately allowing for other relationships – and maybe more. Better pastiche than indifference or speechless shock. Citation as homage is no longer the case here. We are now in the fast, consumable universe of instant availability, of Heidegger’s “de-severance” (Ent-fernung) of the world: the undoing of distance for the sake of closeness-at-hand, ready to be appropriated. Countless development projects in China copy European cities, palaces, or famous monuments down to the last detail. This is not a mere transfer of technologies, or even imaginaries (and even less so, of erudite cultures), but rather the direct consequence of the opening of the mind to the worldwide network of signs. While in the past replication was aimed at lofty goals of social edification, in a somewhat conceited gesture that aspired to inscription in history through the imitation of its great periods (San Francisco’s City Hall imitating the dome of Saint-Louis-des-Invalides in Paris), in our times reproduction is deployed in the most ordinary, horizontal domain of vernacular entertainment, business, or housing architecture. It’s no longer the State that chooses to resort to imitation as bait, but private corporations that turn generalised simulation into a development principle.
However void of meaning architecture may be, since it merely exhibits pure forms and what they contain, under the mimetic yoke it becomes here a sort of Arts & Crafts schoolmistress displaying on the dashboard, before the children of mass consumerism, an enchanted album of renowned monuments. She does not merely limit herself to dividing the terrain into a grid, she aspires to sculpt the volume according to her rules; she somehow geometrises air and movement. While surveyors limit themselves to logically delimiting terrains in the land registry, architects mathematise the third dimension. But vernacular architecture, mixing popular constructions and ultra-capitalist buildings, swiftly covers this purely rational structuration of volume with images and symbols. It dresses up the cube projecting known representations (here again we find Venturi’s and Scott-Brown’s famous decorated hangar); that’s the reason why it resorts to copies and imitations so frequently. This accounts not merely for its playful passion for misappropriations in advertising, but mostly also for its will to disguise the austere severity of constructive ratio with a shimmering book of mimetic façades. Thus the “urban sentence”, to employ a term coined by Jean-Christophe Bailly, often refers to common places in language and space. It relies on banal expressions, conventional formulas, which guarantee the phatic function of language, i.e. the connection with viewers/interpreters. It’s not surprising then that these 1:1 scale models of a famous building on the other side of the world – for example a castle from the Loire region in France replicated in a village somewhere in Brazil, or the Giza Sphinx in the Shiajazhuang area 300 km away from Beijing – should make us feel a sort of Unheimlichkeit, an uncanny feeling of familiarity in strangeness, as if nothing could be more disorienting for the mind than the repetition of the same, and this kind of otherness lying at the heart of the self-same, this madness of identity. This anxiety is normally dispelled by reacting in amusement. Yet there remains nevertheless a