Material Acts - e-flux

Editors

Contributors Mae-ling Lokko, Amy Zhang, Zofia Trafas White, Jennifer Johung, Elsa Mäki

Materials are typically described as raw resources, fixed products, or inert objects to be sourced from a shelf in the store—as commodities more than prerequisites for or products of making. Yet, such understandings of materials belie the complex logistical, economic, ecological, and technological actions that transform matter into the material substrate for our lives.

Material Acts is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Craft Contemporary within the context of the eponymous exhibition, curated by Kate Yeh Chiu and Jia Yi Gu as part of Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

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6 essays

Stitching: Future Fabrication and Traditions of Reuse

Elsa Mäki

When you begin stitching, it is rarely with new material (“new” meaning purpose-made, industrial-grade, fully sealed, and never-before-touched). Stitc...

Animating: Material Agency, Performance, and Intelligence

Jennifer Johung

To “animate” means, among other things, to give life to inert objects. As contemporary biology moves steadily away from the underlying laws that define life in favor of an open field of generative, dynamic collaborations that enliven organic matter, a new theory of materialism has emerged across the disciplines of political science, philosophy, and geography.

Disassembly: In Search of Models

Zofia Trafas White

Viewed through an environmental lens, the televised 1972 Pruitt-Igoe demolition is a poignant reminder of the ubiquity of dismantling buildings by brute force.

Feeding: Metabolic Symbiosis and Cohabitation

Amy Zhang

In 2022, an agriculture company unveiled China’s first vertical hog farm in the city of Ezhou: a twenty-six-story high-rise building, the latest experiment in intensified hog-raising. Inside the megafarm, which resembles an apartment block, the company expects to raise 25,000 pigs a year on each of the twenty-four breeding floors.

Re-Fusing: On Heat Regimes and Material Circularity

Mae-ling Lokko

Ever since the harnessing of fire, humans have nurtured an independence from the sun that has been wielded as a foundational force in shaping architecture.

Editorial

Kate Yeh Chiu, Jia Yi Gu, and e-flux Architecture

Materials are typically described as raw resources, fixed products, or inert objects to be sourced from a shelf in the store—as commodities more than prerequisites for or products of making.

Subject

Architecture, Sustainability, Raw Material, Anthropocene

Contributors

Elsa Mäki Stitching: Future Fabrication and Traditions of Reuse
Jennifer Johung Animating: Material Agency, Performance, and Intelligence
Zofia Trafas White Disassembly: In Search of Models
Amy Zhang Feeding: Metabolic Symbiosis and Cohabitation
Mae-ling Lokko Re-Fusing: On Heat Regimes and Material Circularity
Kate Yeh Chiu and e-flux Architecture Editorial

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Subject