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Transmaterial Politics. Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation

Imagen Subliminal, Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation

A video uses 360 techniques to show an Andrés Jaque's exhibition in Madrid.


'Transmaterial Politics' is the title of the exhibition on the work of Andrés Jaque and his Office For Political Innovation, a platform of thought created in 2003 together with a group of architects, designers, journalists, sociologists and economists, who claims the political dimension of architecture. This exhibition, set at the Tabacalera in Madrid, was curated by Ariadna Cantis, with the purpose of rethinking plurality and the management of difference in contemporary techno-societies from four conceptual frameworks: the one of domesticity; the performance of publicness; the one of the interspecies coexistence, and the framework of the interaction between the on and the offline worlds.

Now, for those who has missed it, Miguel de Guzman and Rocío Romero from Imagen Subliminal have produced a quite impressive video of the exhibition: an immersive tour of the pieces exhibited, section per section.
What is "transmaterial politics"? The attempt of Andrés Jaque and the Office For Political Innovation's work is to redefine the political status of architectural materiality: they won't focus on isolated objects, but rather explore the interaction between multiple entities, in various scales of time.
This interscalar reality is the "transmateria", the results of the displacement from the bodily to the territorial, from the biological to the geographical, from the offline to the online. The Office's work is based on the unveiling of the mechanisms that make architecture operate as an agent of exclusion: historical architectural works, such as Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich's Barcelona Pavilion or Charles and Ray Eames's Powers of Ten, are reconstructed in the work of Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation in order to reveal the conflicts and dependencies that the original projects concealed.

Divided into four sections, Sweet Domestic Arenas, Cosmopolitics, Performing Publicness and Sex and the So Called City, each one presenting different context, the exhibition uses word puns to point out contradictions and to cast a provocative and ironic lights on its subject, such as "SALES ODDITY. Milano 2 and the Politics of Direct-to-Home TV Urbanism" and "IKEA Disobedients". If to name something is to give a definition, to re-name something is to create a fertile displacement that can allow us to rethink its function.
The video by Imagen Subliminal chooses a not-so-common approach to recount an exhibition, using immersive 360 techniques: they animated 360 stills and worked with virtual camera lens distortions in post production in order to create a fast virtual tour along the exhibition. That gives to the viewer a glimpse not only of the exhibition per se, but also of the space hosting it. What's more, the use of distortion enhances the effect of displacement, showing how video can be a correlative objective in illustrating architecture and art.

(Story by Sara Marzullo, The Architecture Player)

Credits

Mentioned project: "Transmaterial Politics" Exhibition by Andrés Jaque and Office For Political Innovation (2017)
Project location: Tabacalera, Madrid, Spain

Spain 2017
Duration: 2'03"