WORK BODY LEISURE | Dutch Pavilion - La Biennale di Venezia

EDITOR:
CATEGORY: PRESS
0 COMMENTS
ALL PHOTOS
Het Nieuwe Instituut presents at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia the Dutch contribution titled WORK, BODY, LEISURE. In this exhibition, curated by architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier, the 2018 Dutch Pavilion addresses the spatial configurations, living conditions and notions of the human body engendered by disruptive changes in labor ethos and conditions. The project seeks to foster new forms of creativity and responsibility within the architectural field in response to emerging technologies of automation.

The 2018 Dutch Pavilion is envisioned as a collaborative research endeavor by a national and international network. This network, which brings together the expertise of architects, designers, knowledge institutions and the private sector, will test and disseminate outcomes before, during, and beyond the exhibition timeframe and venue of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018. 
The curator, Rotterdam-based architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier, head of the Research Department at Het Nieuwe Instituut, will act as the instigator and creative mediator of the multiple contributions.

WORK, BODY, LEISURE

With the title WORK, BODY, LEISURE, the 2018 Dutch Pavilion addresses the spatial configurations, living conditions, and notions of the human body engendered by disruptive changes in labor ethos and conditions. The project seeks to foster new forms of creativity and responsibility within the architectural field in response to emerging technologies of automation.

 

ANTHROPOMETRIC DATA. CRANE CABIN OPERATOR VS REMOTE CONTROL OPERATOR. DRAWING BY HET NIEUWE INSTITUUT, 2017

Analyzed in the research project Automated Landscapes, the logistical infrastructure of the new, fully- automated APM container terminal in the port of Rotterdam’s Maasvlakte II—where self-driving vehicles, automated cranes, and diverse interfaces maximize the handling of containers with unprecedented performance and productivity—coexist with the architectures of port workers strikes and low-income neighborhood redevelopment projects. It is in these spaces where the architecture of Johan Huizinga’s homo ludens is being reenacted and reimagined.

From New Babylon to Rotterdam Harbour

The Netherlands is, arguably, a testing ground where the future of labor has been and continues to be reimagined. The work of Dutch architect and artist Constant Nieuwenhuys has been a particular trigger for this conversation. In Constant’s New Babylon (1956–74) – an architectural paradigm of free space and leisure afforded by automation – society devotes its energy to creativity and play, and individuals can design their own environments.
‘Automation is a material condition and achievable’, Constant claimed in May 1980 in a lecture at the Faculty of Architecture of TU Delft.
EROTIC SPACE, 1971. CONSTANT NIEUWENHUYS. PHOTO: TOM HAARTSEN © FONDATION CONSTANT C/O PICTORIGHT, AMSTERDAM, 2018.
More than thirty years on, an architecture of full automation is currently being implemented in the city of Rotterdam, from the selfmanaged logistical infrastructures of the port to the logic and relations that define the physical and social landscape of the city, and across agricultural clusters in the Netherlands. Reflecting on a spectrum of theoretical viewpoints, including New Babylon’s initial proposal for a leisure-oriented society liberated from the bondage of labor; the recent techno-optimistic premise that full automation will bring increasing bounty and luxury; and the dystopian forecast of rampant, machine-abetted human unemployment and inequality, WORK, BODY, LEISURE claims that these visions are already shaping contemporary labor structures and, ultimately, our capacity to redesign them according to a different set of ethical principles.
FOODORA RIDERS, JOHANNES SCHWARTZ, 2018
The clear demarcation of work and leisure time is no longer a prerequisite for a post-industrial society. Assisted by communication technologies and a growing digital infrastructure, the office space and that of the factory mutate into a dispersed infrastructure across domestic, private, public, and shared spaces in the city. The success of these labor infrastructures is many times dependent on exploitative, extractive, and discriminatory technologies and economies.
LED LIGHTNING, KOPPERT CRESS, © PHOTO_ JAN VAN BERKEL
The Netherlands is a testing ground where the future of labor has been and continues to be reimagined. Meticulously shaped and designed, its landscape is the result of centuries of human-machine enterprises. The regularity of Dutch land lots is reinforced by that of the greenhouses that sit on top; enclosures where the productivity of the ground is controlled and maximized by automated technologies. They are unrestricted by exterior conditions, their immediate surroundings, and soon, human labor.
LOCKER AND REFRESHING ROOM FOR EMPLOYEES AT APM TERMINAL OFFICE BUILDING. ROTTERDAM, 2014. PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF NELLEKE DE VRIES, INTERIOR ARCHITECT
The flexible office has become a landscape of open office spaces where workers no longer have a reserved seat, but rather reinvent their personal workspace every morning. Assisting these ever-changing communal spaces, walls of lockers present the systemic counter image of individualized, closed worlds for the administration of private identities and belongings. Populating factories, storage facilities, co-working spaces, as well as the leisure-oriented architecture of the changing room, the locker facilitates the temporal reinvention of space, and that of the bodies that inhabit it. For the locker is an interface between the laboring and the non-laboring self, if any distinction between the one and the other remains today.
Simone C. Niquille’s work unravels the parameters embedded in design software that are being used to optimize contemporary workspaces for efficiency, ergonomics and human/machine interactions. The human body, first measured, then standardized and rendered as data, is finally deployed via ergonomic simulation software for the design of factory spaces.
In shaping architecture, Niquille suggests, our virtual models are ultimately defining what a human body is, while the unknown other, the non-standard body, that non-accounted for in the database— often marginalized in terms of class, gender, race, or disability—is rendered non-existent.
SOFT SKIN. INSIGHT_ INTERIORS OF WINDOWBROTHELS 2008-2014. PHOTO BY TESS JUNGBLUT.
Amsterdam’s red-light district epitomizes the architectures of sex work, and how it has become typologically defined and legally normalized. Their modernist, rationally designed interiors dressed in white regular tiles and equipped with fixed single beds, bidets, sinks, and the omnipresent locker, describe not only an efficient working space but also the transformation of a body into a worker.
THE DOOR OF NO RETURN, GORÉE ISLAND, SENEGAL, 2004. LELA JEFFERSON FAGAN PROJECT AMAL AMAAG
The Door(s) of No Return, a symbol of the slave trade, a particular architecture for the brutal displacement, disposal, and transformation of bodies, languages, identities, belonging. Amal Alhaag focuses on the Door(s) of No Return and analyzes the historical significance and implications for descendants of enslaved Africans. The threshold between the Door(s) and the Atlantic Ocean, Alhaag argues, is not only site for the engineered, racialized body, but also a site of science fiction and a space for acts of resistance.

Collaborative research

The project builds upon Automated Landscapes, a long-term collaborative research initiative on the implications of automation for the built environment, launched by Het Nieuwe Instituut in 2017. Marina Otero Verzier has invited a group of architects, designers, historians and theorists, whose work is a reference for a critical understanding of emerging technologies of automation, and their spatial implications.
Each of the contributors will conceive an intervention as part of the collective exhibition and will be in dialogue with the projects developed as part of the extended program. Curator and radio host Amal Alhaag will address, in collaboration with The Research Center for Material Culture (RCMC), technologies of the body and how these are informed by the concept of the cyborg, enslaved and ethnographic body.
MAASVLAKTE II, ROTTERDAM. PHOTO VÍCTOR MUÑOZ SANZ, 2016

Architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina will reexamine the bed as a unique horizontal architecture in the age of social media, and will look at its use as a workspace that transforms labor. Architects and researchers Marten Kuijpers and Victor Muñoz Sanz will explore the architecture of full automation in the city of Rotterdam and across agricultural clusters in the Netherlands, jointly with Het Nieuwe Instituut and TU Delft. Designer and researcher Simone C. Niquille will unravel the parameters embedded in design software shaping contemporary work spaces and bodies optimised for efficiency, ergonomics and human/machine interactions. And architecture historian and theorist Mark Wigley, will revisit New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuys, and discuss its proposal for an alternate architecture and an alternate society in which human labor is rendered superfluous.

MARINA OTERO VERZIER, CURATOR OF WORK, BODY, LEISURE  PHOTO: DARIA SCAGLIOLA
WORK, BODY, LEISURE
Pavilion of the Netherlands at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
26 May – 25 November 2018, Giardini, Venice
Title of the Exhibition WORK, BODY, LEISURE
Curatorial Team Marina Otero Verzier – architect, director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut
Assistant Curator Katía Truijen
Curatorial Assistants  Flora Bello Milanez, Malou den Dekker
Contributors
Amal Alhaag – curator, cultural programmer and researcher
Beatriz Colomina – architectural historian and theorist
Marten Kuijpers and Victor Muñoz Sanz – architects and researchers
Simone C. Niquille – designer and researcher
Mark Wigley – architectural historian and theorist Extended Program in Partnership with Creative Industries Fund NL
Jane Chew and Matthew Stewart – architects and researchers
Northscapes Collective (Taneha K. Bacchin, Hamed Khosravi, and Filippo laFleur) – architects, urbanists and researchers
Noam Toran – designer and researcher 
Florentijn Boddendijk and Remco de Jong – composers and musicians;
Giuditta Vendrame – designer and researcher
Paolo Patelli – architect and researcher
Giulio Squilacciotti – artist and filmmaker
Liam Young – architect and film director

Commissioner Het Nieuwe Instituut
Guus Beumer (Director, General and Artistic); Adriana Strating (Director, Business & Development)

–

Publication
Published in conjunction with the Dutch Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, the publication Work, Body, Leisure reflects upon urban developments in which automated labor and leisure coalesce, addresses the ways in which evolving notions of labor have categorized and defined bodies at particular moments in time, and discusses the legal, cultural, and technical infrastructures that enable their exploitation. With contributions by Amal Alhaag, AMO, Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, Jonathan Beller, Beatriz Colomina, Silvia Federici, Ayesha Hameed, Femke Herregraven, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Markus Krajewski, Egbert Alejandro Martina, Francesco Marullo, Victor Muñoz Sanz, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Simone C. Niquille, Henk Ovink, Marina Otero Verzier, Paul B. Preciado, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Ekim Tan, Nathalie de Vries, Mark Wigley, Annemarie de Wildt, Marina van Zuylen.
Editor: Marina Otero Verzier;
Managing Editor: Nick Axel;
Graphic Design: Hans Gremmen.
Published by Het Nieuwe Instituut and Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH
Read more about the team of WORK, BODY, LEISURE on the website of Het Nieuwe Instituut

read more about La Biennale di Venezia 2018 here!


SOURCE: texts and images via WORK BODY LEISURE
Links: FACEBOOK / TWITTER / INSTAGRAM

RELATED ARTICLES