s/he would rather do FICTION MAKER

In 2016, nearly 20 years after its first exhibition at the Frac Centre-Val de Loire, New-Territories* has been invited again for a “1993–2050 flashback.”

This event retraces and traces 57 years of work, scenarios, projects, controversies and foresights. It presents the prolific production of the Avatar, a hybrid figure digitally generated in 1993 to stand in for the jackboot or masterfull figure of the “architect/author” and to synthesize his multiple collaborations—BoyeRoche (1989); Roche (1990); Roche & François (1991); R-F-L-H-R-P (1992); Roche, DSV & Sie (1993–97); R, DSV & Sie. P (1998); R & Sie. D/B: L (1999–2001); R&Sie(n) (2001–11), and [elf/bt/c] (2011–16)…

All of these partnership, labels, and systems constitute the fragments of the New-Territories matrix, which has alternately generated, activated, and put them on standby since 1993. 

s/he would rather do FICTION MAKER (eILe Pr_FAIRE la FICTION), the title of the exhibition, immediately points to the two premises that underpin the proposition: on the one hand, the figure of the androgyne, of Aphrodite; a being who refuses gender and therefore refuses to dominate territories or to dominate both through form and matter. On the other hand, Faire la Fiction [Making Fiction / FICTION MAKER] functions as a mode of operation to model the world, to script it. By refusing any form of imprisonment, New-Territories lives in a state of permanent migration; always elsewhere—elsewhere geographically, but also (and always) at the very centre of architecture as a collaborative magnetic zone that combines architecture with cinema, writing, and sharing with artists, philosophers, biologists, mathematicians, and sometimes other architects… It is a porous structure open to the world.

Although it already understood the full potential of digital technologies as early as 1990, New-Territories never stopped revealing their disorders and limitations. In its own words: “Architecture is not a matter of projection, but a matter of ‘distortion of reality.’” 

In s/he would rather do FICTION MAKER, the public is invited on a “paranoiac odyssey” through a series of historic projects (most of which are part of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire collection) and “anthropotechnic” scenarios, (including New-Territories’ latest aventure: M4—mindmachinemakingmyths). 

A new piece, designed specifically for one of the Turbulences spaces, uses robotic and computational processes to once more question the idea of losing control of or emancipating from the preliminary design. This involves an uncertain system in the “Making,” which reacts in real time and substitutes contingencies and artefacts for 3D modelling.

The exhibition will scramble chronology in favour of a nonlinear, both geographic and psychoanalytic approach of the projects. It will track the permanence of certain architectural and technological strategies, the architect’s obsessions, the attitudes and systems inherent to a renewed relationship to the world in its biological, political, and technical dimensions. 

Voice-overs, convergence lines, modes of operation, and mechanic devices within critical strategies guide and abandon us through a fiction/reality refrain. 

A book of interviews serves as an opening and closing of the event. The publication includes interviews with Sylvia Lavin (historian and architecture critic), Jeffrey Kipnis (historian and architecture critic), Cynthia Davidson (architecture critic and publisher), Greg Lynn (architect), Bart Lootsma (historian and architecture critic), Hans Ulrich Obrist (curator), Bruce Sterling (writer), Stéphanie Lavaux (associate and artist), and many others. It directly and literally poses the question of the man who presents himself as the private secretary of “New-Territories”: “_Who are you, François Roche?”

*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, transgender avatar, _S/he_, who authorized Francois 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.

Curators: Abdelkader Damani (director of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire) and New-Territories
 

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