Juli Ashton Streaming

Usure, the aesthetics of post-Risorgimento

the Belgian pavilion at the Venice Biennale

The discovery of synthetic materials resistant to wear seemed to square the circle. A cheap, malleable, durable and, above all, it was believed, indestructible. Were bakelite, plastic, asbestos cement (as eternal as the name suggests) the murite, anodized steel, and even the pure virgin wool. That with the passage of time, however, began to show their flaws. Scratches, dents, wear is to demystify the image that came out of substances by the human mind like Athena from the skull of Zeus. The solution to this unexpected, was the use disposable: If your copy of the ideal earth was subject to decay, it would just replace with another brand new replica. So, until the saturation of the last decades, where plastic and litter everywhere there would remember the sad aspects of material utopia.
to question this aspect of modern culture - a long industrial research almost a century and began in the nineteenth century - is the intelligent initiative of the Belgian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, given this year's Rotor Group, a collective of designers and architects open, like the rest of the exhibition of architecture, until 21 November. Usus / Usures, title, seven rooms where a be exposed is the deterioration of objects claimed to eternally remain identical to themselves. The exhibition includes a small desk discolored, worn two handles, a subway seat that bears the marks left by thousands of passengers and many other old industrial objects and used that revived a forgotten poetry of the time, the aesthetic value of the traces left by life in its wake.
He explains with particular effectiveness, refined catalog, packed with a cover made of cloth on purpose to ruin and dirty early. "Why do you want to deny the wear tracks of time," because to insist on producing architectural spaces and refractory organic dimension, precarious existence? Now that the process without jumps of modernity does not believe any more - back to architecture - why not abandon once and for all the illusion of technological machines that destroy the planet to live and alienate people who live there?