Souto de Moura is unquestionably
one of the most renowned Portuguese architects of the last decades, thus this
commentary doesn’t intend to discuss the specific quality of his work. However,
Souto de Moura’s awarded Golden Lion at this year Biennale di Venezia for the «precision
in the combination of two aerial photographs, revealing the essential
relationship between architecture, time and place» (in the transformation of an
old farm into a touristic resort in Southern Portugal), discloses the role of architectural institutions such as the Biennale di Venezia.
Today, Europe is a fortress
sinking in its self-generating crisis, but simultaneously exorcizing its own ghosts
in order to reassure that all is fine – that all must be fine. The more the contradictions of neoliberal politics
become evident (Social State dismantling, Public services privatization, far
right rise, nationalism, migrations, precarious work, social and economic
growing inequalities, climate change’s consequences), more Fortress Europe equips
itself with high humanistic and abstract values such as «time», «history»,
«simplicity». But the effect is only a palliative, an anxiolytic, fulfilling a
whole liturgical ritual without raising the underlying political problem.
A clear example of these
contradictions, coming from South America, is the Argentinian Pavilion which,
in the midst of a deep economic crisis and IMF Financial aid program’s request,
proposes to «explore the dialogue between geography, place and architecture»,
exhibiting projects that have been produced since «Argentina returned to
democracy in 1983».
Through Venice’s exquisite
red carpet, parades the great luxury market of haute couture architecture, a high-end product that requires (and
generates) high economic resources, that don’t belong to our profane world and
which is most certainly «above our means» – to use a rather popular motto
during Portugal’s Troika Austerity Program. But isn’t this what happens with most
of the architecture displayed in today magazines and publications?
This «essential» relation
between «place», «time», «architecture» – once a fighting motto against a
powerful technocratic modernism – is, here, converted in a luxury commodity,
from which a vast majority of population is excluded, dwelling in the miserable
daily life without qualities they can
afford. We can and we should admire Souto de Moura’s gesture, but its beauty
contains an undisclosed melancholy: the growing impossibility of making
architecture shareable, of making it common, forgetting the commitment to
society which is in the end the commitment to democracy itself.
Portuguese President Marcelo
Rebelo de Sousa’s commentary on Souto de Moura’s award – well synthetized by
the media as «The Golden Lion it’s very good to the soul of Portuguese people»
– is at least honest, but reveals the real place that architecture occupies in
political and ideological rhetoric: an architecture whose purpose is, after
all, to lift our souls and fill us with pride for our glorious National heroes.
Georges Bataille wrote that
the true function of monuments was to «impose silence on the masses». Today, the
means and forms are certainly not the same, more suited to the performative
dimension of our time, but architecture continues to fulfill this same
function. And as an architecture elevated to the category of monument, Souto de
Moura’s work accomplishes here the same task: to make silence. Perhaps was this
the reason why Theodor W. Adorno said that the «works of art have their
greatness only insofar as they let speak what ideology conceals». I would say,
what ideology silences.
Contrary to what Souto de
Moura says his “gesture against folklore and spectacle” has nothing of radical,
because its only aim is precisely to assure the conditions for folklore and
spectacle to continue by other means.
The possibility of a
resistance in architecture (if there is at all) is less in the radicalism of those
«small simple gestures» – true axis of the economy
and moral of austerity, serving only to hide the effects of neoliberal
politics – and more in the ability to expose the ideological function that all
those words occupy in today’s architectural discourse.
One just has to wonder if
such thing can be done in the long list of biennales and triennales that relentlessly
produce exhibitions after exhibitions and whose underlying principle is no
other than the «celebration of architecture».
≡
Pedro
Levi Bismarck
Editor of Punkto. Architect, researcher and
invited assistant in the Faculty of Architecture of University of Porto.
Image
Francesco Galli
Info
Data de publicação: 11.06.2018
