There Is Not Original Work in this Installation
In summer 2011 Fake Industries Architectural Agonism was invited to participate in the exhibition The Street as part of the upcoming Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture. This show, curated to become a second telling of the famous 1980 Venice Biennale’s La Strada Novissima, would not only include interviews with the participants of this latest exhibition, it would also make a similar commission to the current participants, that is, the design and construction of a 10x4m façade and an installation of their works in the space adjacent to it.
Surrounded as we were by façades with aspirations of originality, we could definitely had designed yet another sensitive and beautiful frontage. We deeply believe, however, that the world is full of architecture—more or less interesting—and we do not wish to add more. Instead, we advocated for a reconstruction of architectural imaginaries that have been forgotten, destroyed, overlooked or dismissed. The rapid and unquestioned naturalization of certain sets of issues within the field, and the destruction of others, urges reexamination as a necessary provocation for disagreement that could lead to disciplinary advances. In a time when the bursting of the real state bubble has lowered the construction rate, when a credit crisis hinders funding for building, when rampant foreclosures render useless more design, when architecture’s intelligentsia delve into preservation as an attempt to grow without expansion, when global civilian revolts reclaim the right for dissensus, in this time, we argued that the only way to proceed is through Agonistic Replicas.
We proposed therefore, a modus operandi based on the salvation of architecture in danger of extinction: the rebuilding hazardous architecture destroyed for political reasons; the re-imagining this generation’s domestic dreams, annihilated, as they were, by the credit crisis; and the rewriting those passages of architectural history that have been tendentiously discarded. Consequently, for The Street, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism proposed a project for each of these three categories: the rebuilding of the artist Ai Weiwei’s studio’s façade—infamously built and immediately demolished by the Chinese government—, a collection of Domestic Dreams in the form of four architectural designs —30 models—displayed on a table, and a film that portrays the orgy of construction and destruction that took place in the time between La Strada Novissima in Venice 1980 and The Street exhibition in Shenzhen 2011.
Project: Installation "There Is Not Original Work in this Installation"
Status: Completed
Client: Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture
Location: Shenzhen
Program: Façade, movie and exhibition of domestic dreams
