September 11 - November 23 International Festival at the Venezia Biennale Architettura
When sunsets become architecture and devices point away from architecture fixed on the material of the monumental. This is when International Festival takes the Proustian effect by the hand, walking down the streets where nothing is about realisation but all about the potentiality of Strawberry Fields forever. This is a proposal for a weak space with unique qualities that architecture cannot hope to equal; variable, free, invisible, present and ever expanding. Fuzzy borders into corporate strategies for maximizing brand perception and enhanced consumer behaviour allowing us to define and inhabit new mental territories, where the persistence of architecture-as-monumental-space appear as evidence of sentimentality. A place where architecture is no longer limited to putting functions and objects in order, a situation in favour of a multitude of perspectives; shifting our understanding of inside and outside, producer and consumer, opportunity and annoyance. Most of all, setting things in motion, producing architecture that says: -Underneath every no flows an unbroken passion for yes.

International Festival: It’s Only Rock ’N Roll (But I Like It)

In 2005 Rolling Stones performed a concert on Copacabana in front of 1.3 million spectators. For an extended hour five middle-aged men made the population of a middle size city believe in rock n roll. Authenticity remained unquestioned even though a number of seconds passed between the moment when Keith Richard’s strummed the guitar and the sound reached the audience on the last row, almost half a kilometer away.

Rolling Stones exists exactly in the suspense between the action and the reaction of the spectator who performs the work of the devoted fan. Outside the stage the band has no life. The rehearsal space has been abandoned in favor of an office crowded with willing professionals busy sharpening the contrast between their beloved Stones and any other participant in the never ending flow of arena rock events. It is when Keith Richards pose with a Louis Vuitton bag that “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” become true. But at the peak of popularity the band has also lost its ability to produce desire, and what is left is an unconditional self-love. In the space, the few seconds, between when Mick Jagger’s voice is hitting the membrane of the microphone and until the spectator a few hundred meters away can perceive it, lays an unbearable realization that everything is over.

Rolling Stones has become a kind of McGuffin, an item existing only to set of a series of mediations. Like with Jackson Pollock’s paintings and the offspring’s of modernist universalism. - There is no motif, only differentiation or performance.

In 1968 Jean Luc Godard and Rolling Stones joined forces. The film “Sympathy For The Devil” portrays the band during the creation and recording of the song. Repeated over and over again the individuals in the band come to an understanding of how to play the song. Mick, Keith and the others hang out, play, test and make mistakes. They are bored and laugh together, smoking whilst playing the bass guitar barefoot. Here it is the process, the engagement in a creative process that is mediated, mediated as an active and uncertain production unfolding without sharp contrast with a series of political narratives delivered in Godard’s hectic and up in the face manner – it’s 1968. The rehearsal space slash recording studio or film set, combined with the repeated song introduces a temporality, a transformation of surfaces where the individual band members are engaged in a process of becoming a community – a community brought together through sympathy – through the affirmative gesture of becoming inauthentic, or as the character Eve Democracy tells Godard’s interviewer:
“-And did you say that the only way to be an intellectual revolutionary is to give up being an intellectual?
“-Yes.
“-And you really mean it.“
“-Yes, yes, yes!”

Supported by Iaspis, International Artists Studio Program in Sweden