An institution that allows for mis-processes and muddled conversations, encouraging non-doing and a sort of deep mis-communication
Critic:
Paul Priessner
Year:
2019
A Hall Made of Wool takes the limitations of the symbolic to heart. The history of modernity is the history of democracies, and in the history of democracy stands the Public Hall. How might we dismantle the Institution while stimulating civic engagement?
A Hall shapes earth materials and basic processes into a building that refuses to metaphorically represent anything, but exists solely as physical reality. Wool replaces columns onto which slabs are directly poured in flexible fabric formwork. Every cast slab misses the ideal form in a unique way. What results is neither exact nor reproducible and what it tells us remains ambiguous.
Exactness and compliance are the conditions of merit and exchange and measurable entities have invaded the modern mindscape and accelerated the rhythm of the info-sphere up to the point of the current psycho-collapse. Only an act of language escaping the technical automatisms of neoliberalism will enable the emergence of a new life form.
A Hall controls noise but maybe sometimes muffles it. Spaces are created that allow mis-processes and muddled conversations. Maybe we collectively begin to encourage non-doing and a sort of deep mis-communication.
