projects #2
Eduardo Aquino
Karen Shanski
September 24, 2001
Architecture Series Guest Lectures
An undefined cross-disciplinary line has linked Art and Architecture since the sixties, as increasingly more artists started to work directly with the space of the gallery as a material (Judd, Oiticica, Matta-Clark) simultaneously with architects who used elements learned from sculpture in the production of architecture (Venturi, Gehry, Wines). As the Neutral Ground Architecture Series indicates, there is an on-going interest to develop practices and theories which compress, unfold and assemble these two defined disciplines in a multitude of new modes of practice and areas of operation. Neutral Ground has invited projects, a collaboration between Karen Shanski and Eduardo Aquino, to develop a catalogue in dialogue with the Architecture Series. The catalogue will be inspired by the works of Rodney LaTourelle, Christine Shaw, David Grenier, and KIT, but will not necessarily be a direct comment on them. This opportunity creates a space for discussion where the overlapping of ideas and attitudes suggest a non-linear reading.
projects intends to question traditional notions of artistic and architectural practices through interdisciplinary strategies including design, guerilla action, teaching, film making, publishing and any other means to instigate the public realm. Their creative efforts search for situations where architecture presents itself as an ongoing process of unfolding, where scale, context and materiality are dealt broadly to respond specifically to each found situation. They are committed to creating a new understanding of the practice of art/architecture, which is at the same time technologically adventurous, politically critical and socially responsible. This hybrid collaboration, or new artistic practice, requires a definition that seeks to subvert the instrumental view of architecture and the disciplinary categorization of art. Their intention is to disrupt, even rupture, existing boundaries beginning with a changed relation between sculpture and architecture. By boundary deforming projects means to find interstices between disciplines in order to expand and evolve new modes of operation/practice in an ever-changing world of ideas and technologies.
Most recently Karen Shanski has been practicing with the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, in Rotterdam, finding new ways to transform the typological paradigm in architecture by using concept and process as generators of form. Eduardo Aquino has been teaching Architecture and Interdisciplinary Arts, along with developing projects for gallery spaces. His works challenge the visitor’s perceptions of culturally charged spaces through the use of architectural elements and electronic devices. projects will be presenting their collaborative work Camel at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro in May 2001.
