react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

Full issue

Introduction to the volume

Shifting economic and political conditions in many urban areas have resulted in queer spaces disappearing at an increasing rate. These bars, clubs, bookstores and other architectural environments occupied by various members of the LGBTQ2SIA+ community are central to a history of sexuality. Their subsequent absence signals a potential erasure of significant aspects of personal and collective memory. As a response to this slow loss, Berlin-based artist and architect Author 2 has employed architectural scanning technology to create highly detailed, digital models of various edifices, interiors, public spaces and monuments in the German city. The three-dimensional models are then processed as key components of two parallel projects: a website that enables visitors to explore a selection of spaces paired with recorded interviews and a virtual reality (VR) artwork animating the architectural archive. In this conversation, Busch discusses the ongoing project Scanning the Horizon alongside the application LiDAR laser scanning techniques to create highly accurate visualizations of various built structures throughout Berlin and convey distinctly queer experiences of space. The artist defines how publicity, existing access and other protocols shape the selection of spaces featured in the project. Queer tactics of cruising architecture via the equipment are further expanded to address the theoretical potential of the limitations of the technology and the aesthetic experience of the website and VR work. In this regard, the growing archive is examined as a repository or remainder of space that simultaneously embraces and counters the ephemerality of LGBTQ2SIA+ records.

Diana Taylor defines the archival “as documents, maps, literary texts [...] all those items supposedly resistant to change” (19), and the repertoire as “[enacting] embodied memory [...] all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (19-20). The archive is marked by human intervention; the decisions about what is preserved circumscribe the finder’s agency and their means “to find out” (20). In turn, the “being there” of repertoire animates and amplifies this archival non-neutrality. But, some performance artifacts seem to resist this compartmentalization, functioning as a singularity of archive and repertoire and in doing so, cease to be “well-behaved.” This essay will examine the “unruliness” of Baccio Cecchi’s Descrizione dell’ apparato e de gli’intermedi fatti per la storia dell’ Esaltazione della Croce (1592) as it oscillates between archive and repertoire. Ostensibly a description of a temporary theatre and the intermedi performed between the acts of Giovanmaria Cecchi’s L’esaltazione della Croce during the 1589 wedding of Ferdinand de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine, the descrizione expresses what is meant to be evoked by that space, and what knowledge—religious, political, and symbolic—is transmitted in the course of the performance. As a record of Baccio Cecchi’s presence and experience, and in its reliance on a specific place and moment of the performance, this essay willdemostrate how the document functions as both archive and repertoire. The tension between the necessary witnessing of the repertoire and the optional engagement of the archive constitutes the disruptive centre of Baccio’s descrizione .

Since the nineteenth century and with greater intensity in the twentieth century, an ephemeral graphic imagery invaded everyday life on a previously unknown scale. These objects printed on paper with generally industrial techniques emerged linked to the daily, administrative, economic and pedagogical dimension of urban life and the consumer society of industrial capitalism. Often destined to be discarded after a specific use, some of them remained in public or private collections and were preserved for their symbolic, aesthetic or emotional value. In Argentina, the vast majority of these prints have been lost, neglected, or found in fragmented collections, rarely known, dispersed in sets grouped by their use or theme. They have been rejected by high culture and relegated by academic research. However, these devices, as part of the common graphic heritage, shaped the visual and material culture of the past, and treasure experiences and a collective social memory. For these reasons, the Profumo Archive represents a unique case in the local sphere, as it brings together a collection that, due to its features and dimensions, stands out from other public or private collections in the country.

This piece will discuss obsolescence in objects, spaces, and labor practiced within spaces of luxury and exclusivity – the British clubs in India. Certain practices and rituals employing gongs, bells, and servants-in-waiting were constructed to maintain racial, and classist differences in colonial India, continue into the 21st century. This paper asks why colonial practices do not easily become obsolete?

Participatory art is characterized by a certain openness, inviting members of the audience to fill in the gaps of a work of art that is initiated by one or more visual artists. Processes of interaction, collaboration, and co-production are at the heart of this type of art practice, which started to flourish for the first time—at least in the western world—in the so-called long sixties (starting in the late 1950s and ending in the early 1970s). These temporary processes do not necessarily bring about tangible end products that can or should be preserved for the future. Participatory art projects tend to be focused on the here-and-now and the generated results are mostly characterized by mutability, multiplicity and ephemerality. 

 To a certain extent, one needs to accept that these so-called ‘participatairy’ artworks—i.e. works that are both participatory and airy (or ephemeral) in nature—are no longer there and can, in the traditional sense, not be preserved, stored and collected for the future. But that does not mean that we should completely forget about these fleeting works or stop considering (alternative) ways to pass them on and make them ‘last.’ But how does one pass on these ephemeral forms of art, without limiting or stabilizing them? How does one keep them ‘in motion’ to prevent them from vanishing into thin air? And who should take part in these practices of safeguarding and transmission? In this ‘Spotlight article,’ I make an argument for moving from practices of co-production to practices of co-care, and for taking into account the so-called ‘living documents:’ those audience members who once participated in the events in the 1960s and 1970s and can now, when still alive, be considered valuable repositories of data, stories and memories. 

Architecture’s fate has been sealed, and our continued resistance to its destiny of demise has led designers and engineers onto a path of forging local order at the price of global disorder. This disorder does not remain constrained to new corners of space, however. It haunts us from afar, promising to creep back and reclaim the places we’ve thought to made our own. Lessons from Native People, avant-garde Japanese modernists, and even Burning Man artists show us how we can embrace ephemerality and plan for a more cyclical architecture that’s better attuned to the planet’s energy flows. A high-level trajectory is proposed to help steer us away from the cliff of irreversible climate collapse, but it requires us to relinquish contemporary conceptions of how architecture ought to be built.

In early 2024, the Willy Wonka Experience in Glasgow became infamous for its lackluster execution. Promised an immersive adventure, visitors instead encountered a dark, poorly decorated warehouse with minimal set design and dubious use of AIgenerated visuals.1 Guests, and soon the internet at large, criticized the event for its lack of effort and creativity. While initially amusing, this uninspired production could be indicative of a broader trend: the rapid, superficial production of content driven by generative AI and the consequences of overreliance on AI without thoughtful human input.