De-standardize Marres

I spy, I spy a little lie, Marres, from 13th December to 4th February 2017, Maastricht.

What design tools and modalities can we use for the common city? How can we shape it? Today, what we still use to create our habitat consists of a series of elements and theories inherited from modernity. The architect Giancarlo De Carlo, in his Architecture of the participation says that “firstly, we can say that to label and classify human behaviors we must have recourse to ‘typification.’ We must, in other words, create a model-man who produces action which can be considered typical. Let us observe that the model-man has neither society nor history, that his perimeters do not extend beyond the rotation of his members. His behaviors are no more than abstract descriptions, having a little to do with reality: they embody neither contradictions nor conflicts because the circle within which the behaviors of the model-man occurs is empty “. The project imagined for Marres tries to deny and subvert this condition decomposing and recomposing the design modernist paradigm by playing. Within the standards of Le Corbusier’s Modulor, it is impressed the violence of the homogenization of behaviors. While the modernist design is based on a top-down approach, on the typification of the human body, and thus on standards, in order to rethink the future common habitat it is necessary the subversion of all those modernist paradigms. With a series of simple geometrical shapes  the user will be able to decompose and rebuild those elements through simple joints, thus playing as a child.

 

I spy, I spy a little lie, curated by Evelyn Simons and Isabel van Bos.
14.12.2017 – 04.02.2018

 

Participating artists: Henry Andersen, Felix Breidenbach, Alejandro Cerón, Nicholas Hoffman, Aurélie d’Incau, Jesuus, Tim Löhde, Jose Montealegre, Ektor Ntourakos, Johanna Odersky, Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (Gary Farrelly and Chris Dreier), Nadia Perlov, Maria Gil Ulldemolins and Remko Van der Auwera.

 

Scenography: Parasite 2.0
Collaborator: Matthias Verhoene
Graphic Design: Roxanne Maillet