Phantasma - e-flux

Editors Nick Axel, Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Nikolaus Hirsch, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel, Myriam Uzor

Contributors Rahel Hartmann Schweizer, Annemarie Bucher, Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk, Rike Felka, Emma McCormick Goodhart, Kate Lacey

In a world structured by networks, connectivity threatens to replace contact. Connectivity promises exchange without encounter, transmission without friction, efficiency without presence. Contact demands something harder: the risk of misalignment, the messy labor of staying with trouble, of being implicated in the complexities of relation. Contact is not seamless, but textured; marked by negotiation, misunderstanding, and mutual transformation. This distinction draws us to think differently about the spaces we inhabit.

Phantasma is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and “Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt” (“The final form will be defined by the architect on site”), the Swiss Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel, and Myriam Uzor, commissioned by Pro Helvetia.

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7 essays

A Place for Listening

Kate Lacey

To be a listener is to be more than simply a hearing body being in or moving through space, though that is part of it.

Metabolic Matterings

Emma McCormick Goodhart

A digital and so-called “sensory” facsimile lives in a subterranean museum complex in Montignac, France, adjacent to the cave it simulates (and to a prior replica, forged by a single painter and two sculptors, without additive technologies).

Lisbeth Sachs and the Biomorphic

Rike Felka

Today, round and flowing forms are still regarded as exceptional or marginal phenomena, even though progress in construction techniques and the increased availability of pliable and castable materials has made them easier to build than in the analog age.

Remembering Through Spatial Storytelling

Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk

Spatial storytelling has the power to facilitate remembering—excavating, scavenging, fabulating, and making sense of what Saidiya Hartman calls the scraps of official “stable” archives, ones that only whisper slithers of Black women’s lives.

Connections, Displacements, and Overlays

Annemarie Bucher

Exhibitions are perceived first and foremost as presentation rooms and displays for themes and objects. On a deeper level, however, they also reflect the interests and values of their promoters, hosts, and target audience.

The Most Wonderful Palaces

Rahel Hartmann Schweizer

The architect perhaps now feels like the youth in the legend, given a lyre by the good sorceress. As soon as he began to play it, the most wonderful palaces arose around him, guided by his fantasy. He throws the lyre to one side, eager to set foot in his palaces, to walk around them, only for them to silently collapse and disappear. He had forgotten the warning that went with the muses’ gift: he could never enter his creations.

Editorial

Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel, Myriam Uzor, and e-flux Architecture

Phantasma is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and “Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt.” (“The final form will be defined by the architect on site.”), the Swiss Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel, and Myriam Uzor.

Subject

Architecture, The Body, Knowledge Production, Networks, Immaterial Labor

Contributors

Kate Lacey A Place for Listening
Emma McCormick Goodhart Metabolic Matterings
Rike Felka Lisbeth Sachs and the Biomorphic
Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk Remembering Through Spatial Storytelling
Annemarie Bucher Connections, Displacements, and Overlays
Rahel Hartmann Schweizer The Most Wonderful Palaces
Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel and e-flux Architecture Editorial