Marion von Osten, “Architecture Without Architects—Another Anarchist Approach,” e-flux journal, no. 6 (May 2009), →.
See Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza’s contribution in issue #6 as well for a detailed account of this dynamic: →.
von Osten, “Architecture Without Architects—Another Anarchist Approach.”
Jean Baudrillard, “Utopia deferred…” in Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967–1978), trans. Stuart Kendall (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 62.
Mariana Silva & Pedro Neves Marques, “The Escape Route’s Design: Assessment of the Impact of Current Aesthetics on History and a Comparative Reading Based on an Example Close to the City of Berlin,” e-flux journal, no. 6 (May 2009), →.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Palace of Projects, excerpt from text written in There are No Such Things as Unsuccessful Projects.
See detailed documentation of each project with translations of text in the drawings here: →.
“The performative character of these events would then simultaneously translate into a non-commensurable action, a production of meanings and free spaces, conditions and acts of self-identification, precisely through this absence of an intentional audience, the absence of a predefined performative structure; therefore of a demonstration understood as conscious and intentional, as is frequently the case in the production of artistic value, quantifiable and quantified by law. This exemplary character is then paradoxically extracted from its own characteristics of un-example, namely its unformed and undetermined characteristics, foreign to any commensurable regulation in the effective making of the action. … The effective act of crossing the Berlin Wall distances itself thus from the Palace of Projects, given that only when the monument, itself a symbol of aspiring potentiality, is effectuated through the attempts at crossing the Berlin Wall, is it accomplished in Life. Nevertheless, this recognition of the symbolic diluted in life, that is, unrecognizable as such while it occurred, would implicate the negation of the proper identity of monument, its understanding as such, given that the permanence of its status would necessarily make its de-signified establishment in the world impossible. Solely by denying the monument its proper self-referential status as monument could it perhaps, differentiated by this precise negation, permit its own dissolution in the life-world”
“Accordingly, and in view of the state of democratic negotiability of value mentioned above, one is confronted with a situation in which history seems to reply retroactively to the proposals elaborated by the Kabakovs’ authors, precisely by the particularity of the attempts at crossing the Berlin Wall in its verticality. The cases of escape from the Soviet regime, perpetuated by numerous people during a determinate period in time, by transgressing the boundary of the Berlin Wall, is equivalent to an equal or corresponding innumerability of projects, whose conception and realization, of individual or collective design, could then constitute an answer or a historical counterproposal to the Kabakovs’ projects. This response, as counterproposal, is given by its exemplary character in opposition to the previously cited demonstrative enunciation of the artist. Put differently, the character of the aforementioned events imposes precisely and necessarily the will or act of taking the design in hand, no longer understood as a project or model but as the physical actuality of an act in its simplicity of idea. With a multiplicity of common objects used for and during its concretization, it does not cease to propose its execution to each inhabitant, individually and without exception. … That the meaning found in the Palace’s proposals would have been extrapolated in their unfinished condition and consequently demonstrated a real existence of these individual gestures of social significance, in that the referred projects would have already, truly, at a given moment, and even if in another time and by other means, been effectuated.”