Grandeza Studio: STAGING THE PLANETARY INTERREGNUM

“Interregnum” is a Roman legal term that refers to the interim period between the death of a sovereign and the enthronement of the successor, a moment of political indefinition where anything could happen or, as Antonio Gramsci described it, a time when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Without underestimating the worrying parallelisms between the time when Gramsci wrote this in his Prison Notebooks and today’s worldwide re-emergence of fascist, nationalistic, and religious anxieties, GRANDEZA STUDIO will discuss how today’s “planetary interregnum” could also be seen as the time-space in which inherited “truths” reveal themselves as historically contingent constructs and, therefore, are susceptible of critical enquiry and transformation.

Through a multimedia session and an exhibition showcase at the CU Denver College of Architecture & Planning, GRANDEZA STUDIO will unpack how their creative practice entangles with research, design, writing, performance, filmmaking, and pedagogy. The team will embark on a multi-scalar journey across a series of allegorical scenographies of the “interregnum”, including the Great Barrier Reef, a gigantic mountain of salty debris in Barcelona, ​​the Pilbara region in Northwestern Australia and the surface of Mars, amongst others. By delving into the material and discursive traces of violence reshaping these territories, the team makes tangible and connects local phenomena with complex global dynamics inscribed in current processes of extractive, ecosystemic and social destruction.

Understood as architectural recompositions of bodies, discourses, objects, and territories, these allegorical scenographies become a departure point from which to engage in acts of radical political imagination. In these acts, GRANDEZA STUDIO put their bodies in service of a perpetual rehearsal, trial and error, hypothesis making, world-unmaking-and-making, and a necessary process of collective unlearning.

Exhibitions at CU Denver CAP
Staging the Planetary Interregnum is the first exhibition commissioned by the University of Colorado Denver CAP Exhibition and Lecture Committees as part of an ongoing project to consider new formats for scholarly research. This project will bring transdisciplinary practitioners together and propose experiments of the interior, time-based media, and performance. Sarah Hearne (Exhibitions) and Leyuan Li (Lectures) co-chair these committees for 2024–25.