It begins with one word. Choose your own. Katarzyna Krakowiak at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, Barcelona.
Let’s not postpone our lives. We do not believe in the time that comes “after all this is over”. What happens with our world is a continuum. There is no end after which everything returns to what it used to be.
Is there a word that you would like to make last?
What word would you propose as part of a polyphonic composition of multiple voices?
What word would you like to take responsibility for?
What word would you contribute to the life we all live together?
Let’s live and act together now.
The artist Katarzyna Krakowiak, curator Marcin Szczelina and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, cordially invite you to compose and build together a new structure, both architectural and linguistic.
It begins with one word. Architecture composed together. Emerging out of the current lockdown, the composition will become a voice of our life lived together, a question about the current state and future survival of our community, its openness, freedom and creativity. A call for hope.
Photos: Anna Mass
The artist’s initiative thus transforms the Barcelona Pavilion into a site of enquiry about the new beginning of a structure of the language of architecture and the architecture of language. Presented at the Pavilion, the polyphonic composition will become a collection of submitted words – described, translated and used to find a common denominator, a nexus that marks the beginning of the new structure.
Krakowiak views architecture, especially amid the current global crisis, as continuous, an imperfect verb, its activity and role never accomplished. We compose architecture without dimensions, it is immeasurable in its lasting, its dissolution, its overlapping. We compose an architecture that speaks – not only with words, but also with the spaces between them that open up a territory of critical enquiry on architecture, language, our current and future community. It is a site of diversity and difference. A space of translations, both between the languages of the project participants and between architectural and linguistic structures.
A space where the horizon constantly extends in as yet unknown directions.