Urbanism – the study of the urban built environment, public space organisation, public architecture, public money, public memory, public taste and public life – is certainly a public matter. There is no need to explain it further. However, the precise subject of what counts as a public matter is not so clear. Especially when we think of such ever-changing categories as the formation of cultural canons: what we hold as worthy of attention, archiving, and protection.
Architecture experts consistently argue for preserving and protecting modernist architecture, but they have difficulty winning sympathy from the political and civil lay public. Hungarians do not like modernist buildings. They plaster them with mediocre graphics; they cover them with images. They tear them down and replace them with facades of a historical world that has never existed.
hasing revisionist and purist fever dreams, they destroy the material manifestations of an ideal, pointlessly arguing for a “unified image” of the city. This tendency cannot necessarily be resisted with arguments. Arguments must be materialised; an experience must be produced that vividly reveals to the audience a cultural logic shaped not by the demands of temporal taste and politics but by the desire to recognise, defend and discursively engage with the outstanding achievements of other eras.
Andreas Fogarasi’s work is an attempt to evoke this experience. We have already witnessed this ambition in his project Kultur und Freizeit (Culture and Leisure), presented at the 2007 Venice Biennale, where he addressed the transformation or disappearance of the spirit of places through the cultural houses left vacant after the regime change.
Following the same agenda in the works presented in the current exhibition, Fogarasi once again aims to display the processes of cultural memory and canonisation in sensory form, presenting modern architecture at the margins of the current cultural canons in both temporal and international contexts.
Kata Benedek