BIENNALE AS EXTRA-TERRITORIAL SPECTACLE
Spring 2015
Architecture and Memory
Advisor: Koon Wee
PRODUCTION OF TERRITORIAL SPACE
Looking through the spectacle of territory, memory and space, viewed as fragmented and localized, reveal to be diverse and grounded where relations between spaces are produced socially to fight off homogeneity.
Lefebvre suggested that ‘the city will only be rethought and reconstructed on its current ruins when we have properly understood that the city is the deployment of time.’
Shifting from agrarian to industrial and late-capitalist cities, the rural is largely romanticized and perceived as an object of commodification and homogeneity.
The rural is in fact a totality based on relations between different scales emerged from daily and yearly events. Memory of the rural space is not frozen but often ossified.
If the territory can be seen as a ‘spectacle’, then memory itself can submerge into the mass media through interaction rather than representation, and the ‘spectacle’ can allow the rural territory to reveal itself as those social relationship between people, space, ground mediated by events.
PERCEPTION & FIGURATION
McLuhan asserted that the medium is the message, where the content is overwhelmed by the mode of representation. In the territory as a spectacle, one can no longer perceived a frozen frame of the rural, rather, being introduced diverse and distinguished ways of order that allow different scales to juxtapose each other, i.e. state, urban, individual.
Nowadays as globalization often results in homogeneity incurred by the capitalist market, the rethinking of the territory allows us to imagine and read in a larger scale not with one definition.
1. The elements of space and the society are abstracted with a particular lens, which allow different subjects, objects, events, agendas of different aspects to be distinguished;
2. through the figuration of such representation, one can read the multiple layers of relationships expressed with different experiences, dimensions & scales;
3. such figuration can allow one to participate in relating and figuring out the infinite possibilities of meanings which constitute to a diverse rather than a definitive perception.
AUTHENTICITY & RESTORATION
The Venice Biennale and many other city/terrirory based expositions, exhibitions, festivals have been successful in bringing the city to participate and become engaged with the public in promoting, criticizing, scrutinizing or at least observing the potentials, issues, challenges, flux of the place.
As asserted by Baudrillard the simulacra of the biennale is no longer an end in itself, rather, the implantation of a Chinese-themed biennale may transcend the biennale & its content as a social & urban generator in creating new spectrums of spaces supported by foreign capital, knowledge and culture.
As Viollet-le-Duc asserted the restoration of a city/buildings meant rethinking the present technology & culture to reveal the architecture’s historical potential , the biennale implantation may pose new questions, criticism, challenges on the fate of Venice’s future.
Will Venice be overwhelmed by tourists which drive out local residents & street/canal culture?
Will the sinking crisis of the city be solved by foreign capital & power through the hidden agenda of the Chinese biennale?
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