Corporate Arcadia An exhibition of CIVA Foundation, organised by contemporary Architecture department 23.06.2017 – 24.09.2017 Fondation CIVA Stichting President Yves Goldstein Director Pieter Van Damme Director contemporary Architecture Department Cédric Libert Curatorship & exhibition design Sophie Dars Carlo Menon Collaboration Carlo Goncalves Photography Armin Linke Assistant photography Silvia Cappellari Texts Accattone Dan Graham Lars Lerup orthodoxe Manfredo Tafuri Video interviews Sefik Birkiye Nicolas Firket Freek Persyn Philémon Wachtelaer Graphic design Ismaël Bennani Orfée Grandhomme (Überknackig) Video Gogolplex Traductions Patrick Lennon Eriks Uskalis Coordination, production, construction, pedagogical activities and communication Jamal Ahrouch, Marcelline Bosquillon, Francelle Cane, Mostafa Chafi, Stéphanie De Blieck, Patrick Demuylder, Jacques de Neuville, Renaud De Staercke, Tania Isabel Garduño, Sébastien Gilette, Manon Kempinaire, Christophe Meaux, Mihai Minecan, Véronique Moerman, Anne-Marie Pirlot, Laureline Tissot, Dieter Vanthournout CIVA Foundation Aïcha Benzaktit, Cindy Bertiau, Danny Casseau, Catherine Cnudde, Germaine Courtois, Dominique Dehenain, Oana De Wolf, Anna Dukers, Chaïmae El Ahmadi, Andréa Flores, Sophie Gentens, Ophélie Goemaere, Eric Hennaut, AnneCatherine Laroche, Anne Lauwers, Hugo Martin, Salima Masribatti, Noëlla Mavula, Mabiala Mpiniabo M’Bulayi, Luc Nagels, Mostafa Nanes, Yaron Pesztat, Lola Pirlet, Pascale Rase, Inge Taillie, Sarah Tibaux, Sandra Van Audenaerde, Martine Van Heymbeeck, Vincent Vanhoutte
‘One of the peculiar beauties of the twentieth-century context is that it is no longer the result of one or more architectural doctrines evolving almost imperceptibly, but which represent the simultaneous formation of distinct archaeological layers; they result from a perpetual pendulum movement where each architectural doctrine contradicts and undoes the essence of the previous one as surely as day follows night. The resulting landscape needs the combined interpretative ability of Champollion, Schliemann, Darwin and Freud to disentangle it.’ Rem Koolhaas, ‘The Terrifying Beauty of the 20th Century’ (1985) Corporate Arcadia is an exhibition on the passing of time. The starting point – 1989 – represents both yesterday and prehistory. If proof were needed, we only need to put three events back in the context of that year: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the events of Tiananmen Square, and the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie. Remote elements in our collective, deep memory and yet are still present in our individual, surface memories. The year 1989 is also the year commonly accepted as marking the birth of the first generation of ‘digital natives’ – those who make up today’s youth. This change in our relation with time presents all the traits of a noteworthy paradigm shift: the switch from the predominance of the long time – deep memory – to the dominance of the short time – surface memory. An upheaval of ethos that is not without consequences for our urban environment. Historically, the city has always been seen as a stable reality that human life traversed, following the twists and turns of its own movements and existential vagaries. Strangely, during the past century, the twentieth, the urban transformations seem to have supplanted the unstable character of human life. Today one recalls the successive transformations of a state of the world that one has known, and not inherited from the splendour of time immemorial. From now on, the reality of changing cities takes its place in human memory, straddling different registers of variables. As an echo of and/or counterpoint to the exhibition Save the city, Change the city – Unbuilt Brussels #1, which bears in its very foundations the promises of an absolute ideal, we have chosen to negotiate the reality of the present time by inviting two curators – Sophie Dars and Carlo Menon, Accattone – whose methodological (im)pertinence could record a state of affairs and not a state of change. Like the photograph taken on 30 May in Brussels by Armin Linke, which features on the exhibition poster, it is a question of looking in a harsh light at a reality which is there, laid out before our eyes: the difficulty in viewing it consists in accounting for it, in plain language and without any excess. Cédric Libert
Fondation CIVA Stichting is supported by The Brussels-Capital Region. June 2017 © The architects, editors, authors, photographers. © Fondation CIVA Stichting Rue de l’Ermitage 55 Kluisstraat / Bruxelles 1050 Brussel Belgium