Focusing their gaze on buildings, on the processes of construction and on unfinished architectural elements, the artists change the traditional architectural point of view. In the potentiality created by the fragmented and not concluded plans, lie the conditions of a new spatiality based on the concept of potentiality considered as a value to be preserved.
Maintaining potentiality points towards a new direction for both political and architectural action.
With the series Penthouse, Edi Hila focuses his gaze on the unfinished architectures diffused in peri-urban contexts. The domestic architectures dispersed in the landscape are elevated onto plinths becoming imagined architectures loaded with rhetorical and monumental elements such as arches, pediments and pilasters. “Penthouse” reveals new conceptual models for transforming the traces of modernity as possible spaces for a new monumentality.
The work The Column by Adrian Paci is articulated in two elements: the projection of the video and the column resting horizontally just outside the exhibition space. The video shows the transformation of a block of marble into a Corinthian column on a factory-ship in the ocean. The column, universal architectural element, emerges from the labour of a group of workers, who, covered in dust, become an extension of the sculpture. Once completed, the column, detached from its context, is not erected but remains horizontal, in a state of im-potence, of perpetual tension and potentiality.
Through the concept of potentiality, “Potential Monuments of Unrealised Futures” suggests new strategies for inhabiting the contemporary Albanian territory. Albania has faced a phase of tumultuous urbanisation that saw the rise of migration from the countryside to the cities that began in the early 1990’s, after the collapse of the totalitarian regime. The capital, Tirana, is the paradigm of a territorial condition that is recurring in the entire country, a country that stands between a ‘developing/transitional’ and ‘developed/static’ world. The traditional architecture, adopted in order to define a national identity, the imposition of Soviet urban plans and finally, the contemporary speculative wave, have produced a chaotic ensemble in which entropy exists not only towards the countryside, as in many other areas in Europe, but mostly within the city itself.
Albania
Potential Monuments of Unrealised Futures
Commissioner: Ministero della Cultura della Repubblica dell’Albania
Curators: Beyond Entropy Europe
Location: Sale d’Armi, Arsenale
Until 23 November 2014
14. Biennale di Architettura
Fundamentals
Arsenale, Venice