The inherently accelerated pace during the opening days of the Venice Biennale, heightened by an even busier than usual Arsenale, finds a disruptive pause in “Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture.” Despite the ephemeral nature of performance, this year’s Nordic Pavilion in the Giardini, by Teo Ala-Ruona and curated by Kaisa Karvinen, begs for permanence. The exhibition, composed of a durational performance and an installation, gathered large and lingering crowds during its opening week programming. Taking the pavilion itself—a 1962 modernist building designed by Sverre Fehn—as a starting point, “Industry Muscle” exposes the oppressive normativity of modernist architecture. Following a framework of proposed scores for architecture (Impurity, Decategorization, Performance, Technobody, and Reuse), the pavilion’s austere space, objectively beautiful, is populated by samples of a grittier reality.
A blue car, parked right by the main entrance inside the pavilion, is perforated by two large concrete columns attached to a metal and glass canopy structure that meets the ground with a ladder behind the car’s trunk. The structure, blended with the materials of Fehn’s building, reads as elements that have fallen from above. The car remains whole except for its punctually crunched areas; its surface, extensively tagged with spray paint. Behind it, two vertical screens propped on the ground, as if lowered from the ceiling, play in a loop. On the left, empty scenes of parking garages and mounds of construction material amidst an eerie fog. On the right, a torso bearing top surgery scars being tattooed. Behind it, a wall of stainless steel with a continuous horizontal welding mark at the eye level of Le Corbusier’s Modulor figure. Further in, a shed made of concrete, steel, and the same ceiling material as the car canopy is placed diagonally in relation to the room. The concrete once again matches the walls, but the exposed rebar sticking out contrasts the perfect craftsmanship of the pavilion. Another concrete wall plaqued with stainless steel sheets holds a metal box connected to two large syringes described as a “hormone injection gun for animals.” The piercing presence of these objects and the films on display are atmospheric agitators, building up anticipation in the space until the performances begin.
While performance in architectural exhibitions is not a common medium, architecture can’t be conceptualized without performance. Renderings aren’t finished until the scale figures are put in; space isn’t really architecture until occupied by bodies, even if only imaginatively. Buildings are built to be occupied by their users, projected to perform in a particular way and allow for particular ways of performing within. In the architectural context of the Nordic Pavilion, there is something to be said about the performative language of stone, concrete, and glass. Its form follows the function of a room that demands silence, a space without interstitiality. Who is this building built for? By shifting the conception of the user’s body and their use of space, “Industry Muscle” proposes a new engagement with modernist architecture. The ceilings are floors. The glass is not just for looking through, but also pressing against and steaming with breath.
Ala-Ruona shares the stage with a group of three other trans performers: Kid Kokko, Caroline Suinner, and Romeo Roxman Gatt. In the first act they move in pairs, one using their hands, another using their heads. Tension intensifies towards an aggressive teeter of hands into heads and heads into hands, the head pusher often stepping out and asking audience members to offer their hands instead. The performer finds relief in a stranger’s touch where their heads, no longer pushed, can simply rest. The acts maneuver broadly through the space, calling the audience to do the same. For two-hour periods, crowds of people move like shoals around the moving bodies and the tensioned architecture, wrapped by synthy sounds that slowly intensify. As the performers occupy spaces equally unconsidered by both the architect and the audience—pressing against the glass walls, holding up the ceiling, or crawling on the gravel—elements of the building become props like the car and the shed. The architecture is occupied in ways it never has been before, by bodies it wasn’t constructed for.
In a later act, the performers undress and stare into the audience while drawing on their own nude skins with thick markers. Sketching the bodies and the building that surround them, they transpose their vulnerability to the audience. As they lend their skin as canvases to their exterior, we open ourselves up to being perceived. The video of the tattoo, the pointy syringes, the scarred metal panels, the perforated car, the pressing bodies; all foster new conditions within and around enclosures. The enclosure of the body, its skin. The enclosure of the shed, unfinished. The enclosure of the car, destroyed. The enclosure of the building, disrupted.
Skin, both the boundary of the interior self and its presentation to the exterior, is a medium of relation between the two. Didier Anzieu defines our largest organ as the literal Freudian “surface” that straps the psychic apparatus, thus shaping all sensations, conjuring up one’s ego, and projecting it back outwards.1 Following Anzieu, Jay Prossner’s “skin ego” theory signifies the manipulation of the body’s surface in the process of transsexual embodiment.2 “Industry Muscle” subjects those who are watching to an evoked tactile sensation inside their own immediate surfaces. Suddenly, one has to feel aware not only of their bodily enclosures, and the enclosures that touch and surround them, but the embodied psyche of all those around. A predominantly cisgendered audience is forced to consider how an uncategorized body might feel within and beyond their own misaligned or manipulated surfaces, enveloped by many other oppressive spaces, unconsidered to their performance.
All of this is happening in the spatial context of an architectural exhibition, which is typically reserved for observing materials, reading text, and feeling oneself navigate space. In contrast to the dimensional measures of scale, light, or circulation, the level of embodiment that can be felt in the Nordic Pavilion can only be achieved through an attention to the senses: touch, pulse, breath, body, skin, sweat… The pavilion is a prop, and so are the bodies in it—those of the performers and of the audience. The architecture remains as a material symptom of a past that could only exist upon adhered notions of normalcy. Architecture inherently fossilizes ideals into built form. The opportunity these buildings grant us now is to interpret them beyond the pedestals on which they stand. Modernist architecture is a symbol of its time, and will remain for all of ours. What can change is how we perform in it.
Didier Anzieu, The Skin-Ego: A New Translation by Naomi Segal, History of Psychoanalysis Series (London: Routledge, 2016).
Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
