archeography (1st volume)

(2011-2014)

While inquiring into the conflict between new and duration in art, Adorno wrote: "(...) through duration art protests against death. (...) Art is the semblance of what is beyond death' s reach (....)"[1]. From all the artistic disciplines architecture might be the one that more appears to our eyes as evidence of this protest, both in structural and compositional terms. Its peculiar character and inherency underlying in the mode of conceiving itself comes mainly from ancient traditions of invention rooted in the repetition of prototypes, but also in the direct correspondence between the particular solidity of its materiality and the adequacy to the social and civilizational models that define its long cycles. Paradoxically, the aim at eternity that characterizes architectural form, human as it is, carries the ineluctable awareness of that impossibility. Right from the first sketches, architecture always exhibits the insigne mark of nostalgia and also a peculiar melancholic state of a future time that still is not its, and of another time from which it will no longer be a part of. "(...) As soon as artworks make a fetish of their hope of duration, they begin to suffer from their sickness unto death: The veneer of inalienability that they draw over themselves at the same time suffocates them (...)"[2]. W. G. Sebald weaves an admirable summary of these ideas in his novel Austerlitz, particularly in the following excerpt: “(...) At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outside buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins (...)”[3].

As I see it, the memorable images of architecture, whether drawing or photograph, are those that allow contamination by the fragrance of this kind of nostalgia, and by the desire that manifests itself through representation of impossible timelessness and unreachable spatiality. I was guided by these sensitive questions while conceiving these images. However, I endowed them with another paradox making them show the specific phase of a construction site in which the form, while already revealing architectural intentions in the raw rudeness of materials, is standing closer to the melancholic emptiness of ruin, than to the finalized inhabited building in its functional plenitude. Void and its limits, absence and prospection of presence and confrontation between ephemerality and duration are some of the binomials and conceptual relations to which this set of images tries to give expression. Because they were taken in a short period of time of a much longer and complex building construction process, they became unrepeatable images almost instantly. Much of their allure elapses not only from this fact but also from a certain evocation of the timelessness of monument transpiring from the given evidence of the ephemeral.

 

Nuno Matos Duarte, October 2013

 

[1] ADORNO, Theodor W. - Aesthetic Theorie (Translation 1997 by Robert Hullot-Kentor Continuum), London / New York 2002; p.27. (Originally published as Asthetische Theorie, © 1970 Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main).

 

[2] idem, p.28

 

[3] SEBALD, W. G. – Austerlitz, Modern Library Trade Paperback Edition, The Random House Publishing Group, New York, 2011 (Originally published in Germany by Carl Hanser Verlag, 2001).