Page 179 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

ARChITECTURE AND ITS DOUBLE BRUCE BÉGOUT 179
vivid impression of individuality having been violated and cloned, in other words, negated, and of our being witnesses to that mutilation as incarnated in the perfect copy.
It’s not strange, therefore, to find, in these mall-strip outskirts, such a simultaneously naïf and astute deployment of traditional imageries. As one idles by on these three-lane conveyor belts called urban freeways, one has the impression of traversing a huge factory where signs and monuments are being recycled. The disposable legends of corporate capitalism love to dwell on the same narratives and the same images. Like a soothing lullaby for consumers. Vernacular architecture thus often falls in the trap of replication, especially in a universe of speed and constant flux which paradoxically generates the converse need for a fixed identity. We must not see in this worldwide lust for urban imitation and architectural pastiche a simple complicity with cheap swank, but rather, on the contrary, the perhaps inevitable, sane reaction of human sensibility in the face of commercial hyper-solicitation through replication. What we have here is a defensive strategy on the users’ part: they filter the ever new, aggressive, and swift stimuli in accordance with identifiable patterns. Chronic attention deficit disorder sculpts its own environment by itself. Confronted with minds capable only of attention spans lasting seconds, architecture sacrifices its nature as enduring inscription in time and space to the advantage of fleeting iconic effects. It sets aside stasis, all that lasts and forms a world, to turn without second thoughts to the precariousness of mobile, superficial spectacles. This world of simulation that Baudrillard was so fond of, as he saw in it the eschatological end of meaning and the almost joyous acceptance of post-historical nihilism, does not always generate poor quality ersatz, though. Sometimes some creations slide into this catch-all mimetic process that, either through hybridisation or disadjustment, are quite original. And to one’s bafflement, one finds a displaced element under a banal reproduction. Each local culture thereby adapts the models according to its needs and expectations. The vernacular synthesises traditions and migrations. Despite its frequent resemblance to a cheap stage-set for a low-cost sit-com, or, in other words, its lack of depth and ambiguity, this architecture of the double may sometimes generate singular universes. Autopia, which has somehow subjected urban man to the car’s kinesthetic and perceptual schemas for nearly a century now, has managed to create a new sociability: the recognition of a signified in a split second at 60 km/h. This is nothing, and there is no reason to deplore this fact in the name of some ideal age when meaningful exchanges took place in quiet lounges following venerable patterns of conversation. Within the urban flow’s continuous disorder, the mimetic architecture of themed restaurants, fun hotels, and amusement parks valorises what is well known. Our cities’ “existing landscape” must not be acknowledged as an insurmountable horizon or a norm to be followed under all circumstances (the only reality that is ours and we must worship, as is commonly believed by the heirs of post-modernist thought, who in fact work within the status quo), but as a new ground for analysis, neither commodity dystopia nor globalization utopia, where the communicative poverty of this system of puerile and facile references can be dissected live, in order to flush out both the ideological-economic structure that generated it, and the discrepancies that turn it into something other than a simple replication. The suburban artist’s role is once again to find out the sparkle of singularity within the mimetic death drive, to track down, under a seductive wink’s coarse effects, the disarray of meaning itself, something irreducible to the game of citations. In other words, where borrowings stand, the improvised must occurr. Lectoure, March 6th, 2017