daniele jost

In the age og Dust

Altrilavoriincorso Gallery – Rome
20 december 2005

Curated by Gianluca Marziani

ARCHITECTURE AS A NECESSARY DESTINY
Gianluca Marziani

.
Ethically responsable landscapes… buildings equally responsables… sites and structures whose ethical consciousness mirrors their esthetical condition (and viceversa). Symptomatic appearences traced without comfortable compromises, throughout a stylistic leap into human pathological disfunctions, a flight over cumbrous memories and socially allarming messages. Environments and constructions where responsibility becomes synonymous of moral consciousness in terms of artistic project. Sites of memory, relating to handed down sites, mediatic realities and individual living experience; Recognizable places intented as universal archetypes. Thus, appearances which character is definitetly not reassuring but rather anomalous in terms of both the artificial evidence and the blatant contrast that define the surroundings. The architectural volumes are clearly out of scale and present eccessive monochromies, revealing a sort of epidermal and imaginary re-definition (although plausibile if we think about “Schindler’s List” or about some grafic works signed by The Designers Republic for Warp). Their presence within such landscapes recall permanently floating Moloch, striking and invasive, definitive elements aimed at “inventing” realistic futures towards a comatose present.

The work as inner destiny.
Procedure: emotional environment of doubt in facing the world.
The works: cathartic synthesis of collective madness leading to degradation, crime, and decadence.

A thought upon contemporary civilization rendered throughout images and architectural forms, pivotal terms to construct a novel imaginary towards a consequent civic reality, inhabitable and narratively palpable. The image determines here the accomplished form of the artist’s thinking; a visualization of a creative path, the primary and tangibile identity represented as an icon. Architectural volumes address, in such circumstance, a frontal objective of such images, in other words, their obstinate desire to penetrate sites is marked by a strong moral connotation. We are not standing in front of buildings we would like to inhabit, for their surfaces all result permeated with something disturbing. Nevertheless, they structurally represent a symbolic doubt around the suffering of our planet. They become significant objects meant to inform us on civil lessons. In fact, they bear both an expressed negativeness (their structure being a link heading to real freedom) and a non-expressed positiveness (their radicalism as an evidence to be overturned). The impacting acidity of some of colors (particularly the red) inevitably signals alchemic papers, mysterious forms: the silent magic of objects holding special powers.

Daniele Jost empathically binds image and architectural form. The distinction between real and fantastic becomes ethereal. The artist manipulates photography using electronics, skillfully confounding real and virtual features.All coincides within a sole gaze that exceeds geographic boundaries: suburbian decadence, intense landscapes, industrial and agricultural archeology… Such linguistic choice conveys photography, sculpture, audio-visual, digital drawing and installation models, all aimed at creating a visual machine exempted from any preconceived boundary.

.

.

.

FIRST PLATFORM: Architectural Moloch

Autumnal landscapes of dried leaves floors, unlimited forests covered with snow, urban landscapes of cement, cultivated fields, unhabitated streets filled with rows of town houses, a cave, the old and obsolete paper machine…those are among the sites where the author searched for peculiar aspects, historical and geographical features, traces and anomalies of a world that demands radical responses concerning the artistic vision. Abrupt as Moloch between offsite and mystery, some architectural models distinguish themselves within spaces as they were fresh blood spots on the snow. Claustrophobic volumes in a close perimeter, result and reversal of what Buckminster Fuller had theorized as geodetic doms. One after the other, Jost’s livable structures turn around the concept of universal domus. Proving how basic forms are permanently bounded to their original function: thus, and again, ethically responsabile buildings staging both their status and the genesis of their own construction. Houses as the result of urban blight: true surviving reaction and conformation to a decadent version of the world. Sites of necessity.
Spots representing a shelter, a way to escape, a site for meditation, isolation, solitude and rebirth.
.

.

.

Crisis unit . Living form epitomizing the minimum stage of what individuals can humanly sustain. The house as focus for collective discomfort, compulsory shelter for a general emergency situation. Nothing but the site of functional reduction deprived from Le Corbusier idealistic utopia. Even if it strongly reminds Aldo Rossi’s postmodern bell tower, we are inevitably brought back to pinnacle towers, war allarms and outside tensions, all amplified by the contrast of a landscape covered with snow…

Multifunction in-stable . Powerful site reminding constriction, a mandatory bound; the pathology within the walls. The prison, the hospital, the secret laboratory: something dark and disturbing, an architecture made of sharp blocks that reflects an insane ideology, an undeclared dictatorship, laws that constrict and compress…

Generational Manipulations . Retaining walls erected in Chernobyl to circumscribe radiations. The architectural element, essential and firm confirms the negative vitality of walls built according to political intents. Berlin represents a clamorous case although we remember numerous other examples of injurious curtains. The situation within the works properly underlines the contrast with such landscape, a place featured by pastoral nature and raw material integrity. A disturbing scene that stimulates our imaginary towards both the consequences of nuclear disasters and apparently invisibile situations. Eventually, Nature always presents the check for our wrong choices, ultimately requesting from us, humans, the final account…

Itinerant forms (at the present residual) . The classical containers we see in harbours or on trade ships. Now we can find them in an open-air cave, unprobable context for transportation… The containers meant to move products seem now anchored to an archaic ground, nearly as lanscape art interventions (but remember that Jost’s works on the electronic virtuality of the scenes) pointed at stimulating a dialectic between beauty and madness.

Random Autosystem . A pile-dwelling realized with free creative elaboration. A place characterized by a difficult habitability, primitive and absurdly abstract, located on an other site of pure agricultural prosperity. It is everyday life that shapes its features in relation to contemporary world. It’s an individual gesture that moulds the world according to its own image.

Christ garden . An architecture elaborated by a Swiss hermit through the recycling of what found on the ground in question. A site that reflects the utopic vision of the owner, his meditative consciousness, the anomalous way of comunicating with real things. An example of possibile freedom within a landscape that hides energy and evolution potentiality. Inevitably we think about a Paolo Soleri and his Arcosanti, his naturally shaped American town without cars nor auto-referencial consumerism. A place where utopia has been transformed in buildings, streets, energetic systems, products, relational elements and real life…

Die neue ziviliesierung . A Residential three-storied house in Dresda after the well-known bombing. A sorrowfully famous symbol known as one of the greatest tragedies of the past century. We see it in front of some constructions with very little ethic and lavish display of cheap architecture bestiality. “Nothing new”, will be the comment of many. Nothing excusable, we add today in finding again a curse behind another curse. Lessons always occur by rising from the ruins of the past. Some lessons, unfortunately, arouse from periodical layers of ruins, as a single spell was not enough to make us feel the ultimate heartbeat of degradation…

The factory of silence . Two buildings in Hong Kong, the first situated in the financial heart of the city, the second in the periphery. They look at each other as enemies before a duel. We see them, monolithics and absolutes, inside an abandoned train factory. It recalls a scene of Takeshi Kitano where the buildings play the role of the Yakuza characters. The buildings present identical forms but opposite functions: the former, capitalistic, and mere familiar surviving, the second. They represent the strongest conflict of a growing metropolitan delirium, exasperated in a China that is recently experiencing an economic boom. Careful to this work: it points at future directions, the emptiness in which we are constructing, forgetting any respect for human relationships, the contestual quality, the beauty of an inner flight…

Contemporary utopic theather . An ideal home. The one that a child would drawn on a blank sheet. The mental site of instinctive visions. Maybe the place for rebirth. Anyways the space where Jost placet, in front of Corviale, the long Roman palace where all social utopia rapidly turn into suburbian decline

kc1 . A cement house maquette. A message about the multiplication of ideas, about how we seek for approval without conscience, on the disadvantages that technology entails when it gets distracted from ethics. The concrete little house as a replica of a true wooden house. Never the less, the two homes seem distant, they do not comunicate in the right way. Probably such work is the most accessibile for interpretation and recontextualization. A piece where everything is transformed in moral doubt…

.

.

.

SECOND PLATFORM: installation

Baghdad, Scampia, Berlin, Bologna, Capaci, Chernobyl, New York, London, Madrid, Hiroshima, Sarajevo, Vajont… there are others , some cities return several times, others have become famous for the delirium that involved them … let’s say you understood what we are talking about. Sites of wasted tragedies, real spaces containing archetypes of extreme violence, a concentration of blind terror and ugliness we do not want to mention. The dust report us their stories through a hanging and essential installation, a silent diapason around the world’s noises, a light army of small plastic bags that observes the attendants and awakes the still absent gazes.
.

.

.

.

.

.

chernobil 1986 kabul 2001 agadir 1960 alessandria 1303 alessandria 1323 alessandria 391 dc ancash 1970 assisi 1997 avezzano 1915 beirut 1983 Ayodhya 1992 bagdad 1991 bagdad 2003 bali 2002 Bam 2003 bangladesh 1991 banqiao 1975 beirut 1975 calabria 1783 berlino 1945 berlino 1989 Bhopal 1984 boston 1919 bruxelles 1867 ercolano 79 dc

cnosso 1628 ac capaci 1992 cartagine 149-146 ac Chicago 1871 citta del messico 1985 geertruidenberg 1421 guernica 1937 hiroshima 1945 Coventry 1940 Dallas 1936 damasco 1400 damour 1976 Dordrecht 1421 dresda 1945 firenze 1864 firenze 1963 Friuli 1976 Irpinia 1980 Sannio 1456 Matese 1456 johnstown 1889 i’zmit 1999 Jaslovské Bohunice 1977 hyogo 1995 kabul 2001

kashmir 2005 kobe 1995 lisbona 1755 londra 1941-45 Londra 1666 messina 1908 middletown 1979 mumbai 1993 new york 2001 naghasaki 1945 parigi 1853 Oakland 1991 oklahoma 1995 pompei 79 dc leningrado 1943 napoli 1943 napoli 1980 seul 1995 seveso 1976 heffield 1864 spitak 1988 st francis 1928 st Louis 1896 st Louis 1972 stabiae 79 dc

Tokaimura 1999 tokio 1923 tomsk 1993 Tuscania 1971 Volture 1930 torino 1943 ugarit 1200 ac vajont 1963 Valle di scalve 1923 Valtellina 1987 verona 1117 vienna 1859 vienna 1683 bhuj 2001 roma 64 dc roma 410 dc roma 1527 roma 1945 baghdad 1985 tehran 1985 mosca 1812 mosca 1944 stalingrado 1942 honk kong 1987 milano 1980 milano 1943

praga 1968 Stava 1985 gaza 2003 hebron 2003 betlemme 2003 malamocco 1117 Kalkiliya 1967 ramallah 2003 qualqylia 2003 nablus 2003 minsk 1944 mijdal gad 1950 milano 1969 selinunte 409 ac selinunte 205 ac Ribolla 1954 kidalikilagi 1984 jenin 2003 sarajevo 1992 Siruzkoh 1222 rodi 226 ac sumatra 2004 Tangshan 1976 texas city 1947 San francisco 1906 scampia 1997

.

.

.

THIRD PLATFORM: digital drawings

Then, on the edge of the exhibition itinerary, all resumes into the essence of drawing, the light line on immaculate sheets. Here the hand moving as footprints on the snow. The act of drawing recreates mental structures, sensibile inventions reifyable over their own genetical utopia. Let’s think about it: any architectural work is a utopia that becomes form, a mind platform that increases on our planet living ground.
.

.

.

.

.

.

Architecture as necessary destiny

Project and destiny

.

.

.

.

.

.
Let’s conclude our extra-urban journey within the abandoned space of an old paper machine. On the floor, only paper, abundant rolls as a metaphore for human topography. The destiny that is outlined on a blank sheet, the departing element from which Jost embraces the journey after the catharsis operated during each previous stops. Starting again from cellulose, from the perimeter of the ideal house, from the black that marks the foundations on the white paper. Beginning once again from the dust, through the dust, inside the dust that yet hold us and belong to us.

A grain, a person, a story, again a future…
.

.

.