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Van Eyck Academie, From October 2019 to March 2020, Maastricht.
Architecture Parlante concerns an artifact’s potential to tell stories and to envision new paths for collective living. Its title “speaking architecture” derives from a term coined by Claude Nicolas Ledoux to describe structures that explain their own function or identity. The project includes a series of objects and possible architectures inspired by what we defined as an “Architecture Novel” about a fictive group of individuals enmeshed in a conspiracy to take over the main institution controlling their city. If this architecture novel is based on an extreme connection between narration and his surroundings of building and object, the idea behind the plot is connected to the JVE Academie routine. While living the life of the institution, we’ve daydreamed about a group of participants secretly conspiring against it, behind the silent, quiet and polite atmosphere, from the shared kitchen table or the smoking area in the garden to the narrow corridors and the studio-caves. The protagonists of the story are suspended in the act of organizing themself, in a sort of buffer zone without any exit route, in the eternal act of looking for a common view in which the final aim seems impossible to reach.
The main reference behind the story is La Città del Sole (The City of the Sun ), written by the Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella, and one of the milestones of what has been defined as utopian literature. The book, based on the fictional city of the sun, was written during Campanella’s imprisonment, accused of leading a conspiracy against the Spanish rule and trying to establish a society based on the community of goods. The result is an architectural fabula of sorts. The story serves as a script and backdrop to a city construed as small ceramic maquettes. Together they form a plenary mystic vision combining elements of the primitive-future, new possible tribalisms, modernity’s inheritance of standardization, internet culture’s memetic aesthetic, and non-western symbolism and signs. The project takes shape in three parts: a ceramic maquette of the imagined city where the story takes place, a series of daily objects, and the imperative architecture parlante. The outcome is a sort of theatrical representation, where the actors are a series of artifacts, objects and maquettes, while a narrating voice and a moving spotlight trace a line between them.
Narrator: Gary Farrelly
Ph. Stefano Colombo
Parasite 2.0 is a design and research agency based in Milan and London. Founded in 2010 by Stefano Colombo, Eugenio Cosentino and Luca Marullo, it’s specialized in temporary architecture, interior, and exhibition design. They investigate the status of human habitats, acting within a hybrid of architecture, design, and scenography.
Parasite 2.0 has worked and collaborated with Triennale Milano, Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, Pantone, Corraini Editions, Terraforma Festival, Missoni, Nero Editions, Venice Architecture Biennale, and the Shenzhen Architecture Biennale, among others.
They have led didactic activity at Faculté d’architecture de l’université libre de Bruxelles, Design Academy Eindhoven, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and Politecnico di Milano. They taught at The Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, NABA Nuova Accademia Belle Arti Milano, and since 2016 they have been regularly teaching at MADE Program-Accademia di Belle Arti R. Gagliardi in Syracuse, Italy.
Parasite 2.0 were awarded the Young Architects Program MAXXI in 2016. They are represented by Operativa Arte Contemporanea Gallery and Galleria Corraini Arte Contemporanea.
Via Predabissi 1
20131, Milano
Wenlock Road 32
N1 7SE, London
parasite2.0 [at] gmail.com
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