„Let yourself slip through their work and feel its silky and strange texture as terrifies and caresses you.” Lecture by Francois Roche on Behalf of S/he. Experimental architecture has shifted toward a new corpus of instrumentations, made out of tools, computation, mechanization, but also and simultaneously of fictions and lines of subjectivity, synchronous with our symptoms; of fears and great escapes in the “here and now”.
The purpose of this 1993-2050 flashback is to explore attitudes that show a correlation, a co- dependency with the forms they underpin, through their conflicts and reciprocities. Lecture will be held in English language.
It is to discover a post-digital, post-human, post-activist, post-democratic, post-feminist world, … a queer, androgynous, carnal, disturbing, disenchanted, pornographic, transient, transactional world, … where scenarios, mechanisms, misunderstandings, and psychological and physiological fragments are what make up walls and ceilings, cellars and attics, … schizoid and paranoid, between the lines of operative and critical fictions… The androgynous folds and recesses behind which… he(s) / she(s) … hide(s), trigger(s) confusion and gut reactions, suspect hostilities, fantasized idealization, and even premeditated oblivion. We must use paradoxical postures and aesthetical mechanisms to highlight bio-political challenges, the potentials and disorders of contemporary technologies, from their early stages to their merchandising, and suspect them of not being so harmless, beyond conventional discourses and self- conscious aesthetics…
S/He consider architectural identity as emanating from uncertainty principles defined through provisional processes and forms in which animism, vitalism and mechanism become vectors of dynamic mutations.
S/He critically engage contemporary technology in experiments alchemically mixing Eros and Thanatos to develop deliberately ambiguous scenarios that fuse realities that would seem immiscible.
Her/Him synthetic devices works out possibles somewhere between attractions and aversions, simultaneously mixes of obstacles and possibilities, waste material and efflorescence, threats and protections, mechanical powers and natural forces.
Here everything is intertwined and knotted, in the process of becoming, in a movement in becoming.
Works are organized on four time relations:
– Here &Now / A fragile architecture which negotiates with the arrow of time, with the transitory one or what seems the being.
– Here & Tomorrow / An operative and fictional architecture which tries to re-scenarize the relation with a situation, with an environment (like principle of reality).
– Elsewhere & Simultaneously / A speculative architecture which works out devices between robotics, mathematics, neurobiology and biochemistry (last research “Ive heard about” & “an architecture of moods”).
– Daily Psycho Routine / An anthropo-technic research on human pathology and exhibitionism, through ‘machinism’ and movie making, for the series called MythomaniaS (BKK)
Bio / New-Territories
New-Territories is a polymorphous architecture organization. Founded in 1993, it has embraced different labels, names, strategies and purposes. New-Territories is fronted by the androgynous avatar, trans-gender avatar, _S/he_, who authorized François Roche to write, talk and teach on his/her behalf, as a PS / personal secretary, an Ariadne’s wire of this ectoplasmic system and paranoiac mind. ‘New-Territories’ emerged through the multitude of meeting points, friendship and dispute, in the hollow of sympathy, empathy, antipathy …
New-Territories seek to articulate the real and/or fictional, geographic situations and narrative structures that can transform them, with technology, robotic and human natures, physiological and psychological. Exhibited among other places, at Pompidou Center, SF Moma, Tate Modern, Barbican London, CCA Montreal,…selected 8 times at Venice Biennial, in national and international Pavilion, including last show are Chicago Biennial 2015, Istanbul Biennial 2016 and main solo exhibition: “s/he would rather do FICTION MAKer”, Frac Centre, France (Instagram of the show https://www.instagram.com/s_hefictionmaker/). Among the teaching positions held by his-her P.S. F Roche, NewT has been guest professor, over the last decade, in London, Vienna, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Paris, in New-York from 2006 to 2013 at Columbia University, and IKA, RMIT, Michigan, Upenn,….
