Exhibition
Asymptote, instaurations de l'éventuel - Frédéric MIGAYROU
Asymptote opposes coincidence to siting, installation to foundation, in order to claim an emphatic right to build unencumbered by the traditional spatial order imposed by a foundation. "Marinetti's locomotive has derailed," according to Hani Rashid in "On Recent Non-Events." The mobility and speed embraced by the Futurists have not, in the end, caused a radical change in how we conceive our relation to space. Only Lazlo Moholy-Nagy in "Vision in Motion" possibly understood that the proliferation of optical instruments in the twentieth century has introduced such a fragmentation of the visible that a spatial inscription is no longer assumed a permanent referent. Asymptote proposes a reconfiguration of architecture through a radical mutation of its relation to space as an abstract referent, the one-dimensional space of geometry. Henceforth, architecture will organize material that is complex, perpetually over-determined, supported by permanent grafts and overlaps, deformed by use, and enhanced by ever-changing symbolic interpretations. The architectural work is no longer relative only to its spatial inscription, the reified structure of an establishment that imposed a hierarchic ordering upon all political, economic, and social parameters. Today architecture must organize itself into different configurations simultaneously, hybrid spatialities nourished by technology and media. As Hani Rashid and Lise-Anne Couture assert, architecture is entering in an age of fluidity without the ontological anchor that geometrically defined space previously supplied; it must express and create new modalities, open up possible worlds.(...) "Amnesia" and "anemia" deny monumentality's static time, instead reclaiming presence, an infinite extension of the "now" (maintenant), the desire to rediscover the principle of ambivalent memory that Jacques Derrida emphasized in "Le puits et la pyramide." Building should be autonomous; this would not liberate it from the traditional constraints of architecture, but these no longer determine form or function. Asymptote's claim to autonomy is its capacity to specify all elements - symbolic, technical, and material - that could contribute to a project. "Autonomy" is not the modernist term of idealism or abstraction denounced by social critics. Autonomy is the desire to think and to labor within the entire complex sphere of the real. The architectural work becomes an unfinished object, a permanent continuum of projects that have reached the limits of definition, that are limited both in their ability to define themselves and to be defined socially, through use. The definition of a project's unity is its pragmatism, its ability to reconstruct its universal meaning for each one of us. There is a silence of an idealized form, an architectural "non-event," but an introduction to the eventual as something related to the event, the eventual that operates at the heart of the building, affirming an architecture in action, perpetually renewed.
