Freedom and torture: the new architecture of domination and refusal. The aesthetics of refusal and architectural atavism

• Autor(a) principal: Biddle, Erika
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/comunicacaoecultura.2013.5117

Since 1963, artists Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins have attempted to realize a body made immortal by reskilling its habitual experience of architecture. Their project to “reverse destiny” entails the affective recompositioning of social forms via cognitive, sentient, perceptual and proprioceptive crosstraining exercises conjoining the body and architecture. They have garnered accolades from artists, critics and theorists drawn by their ambition to transform the habits that take life away from life. This paper argues that much of the attraction to their project is on the level of language and not practice. While their rhetoric promises new avenues of freedom, their production remains bound to the object and the synthetic nuclear family home. Contrary to the view that Arakawa and Gins’ work is playful and horizontalist, underlying this veneer of play is a politics of force, of carving their ideal into the body through the spectacular imposition of architecture on habit.