James Beckett

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2012

A Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa

Works

This automated archive produces scenarios for ‘clandestine building1 across Africa, a practice of illegally expanding on ones’ living or working space. The system uses actual examples of Modernist architecture from across the continent as source material – buildings which show potential for enlargement, in order to maximize usage of space. Reconstituting a given building as a kind of façade portrait or composition, the machine uses wooden building-blocks to describe the particular negative spaces suggested for exploitation.

Negative Space: A Scenario Generator

Beckett takes a rich yet little-known African Modernist tradition as a point of departure for his work Negative Space: A Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa (2015). It consists of an automated storage and retrieval machine (such as those used in warehouses and pharmacies), reconfigured to arrange wooden building blocks to create portraits of specific Modernist buildings across Africa. Beckett takes a rich yet little-known African Modernist tradition as a point of departure for his work Negative Space: A Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa (2015). It consists of an automated storage and retrieval machine (such as those used in warehouses and pharmacies), reconfigured to arrange wooden building blocks to create portraits of specific Modernist buildings across Africa.

A Real Caption

This is a video

Background

II

Jean—Could you tell me roughly what tubolari means?

And attrezzature?

Raymond—Do you want to translate this book or not? It doesn’t make much sense if you are still isolating a few Jean—The captions are so beautifully set. Partially in differently sized capital letters. The names always all written out in full. On this photo, nearly fifty employees are gathered together, all first and surnames are quoted in full. The photo was taken by a professional and is perfectly illuminated. You can recognize the warehouses in the background, even the factory.

Raymond—Who published such books? People would have surely rather read a few poems – or the newspaper.

Jean—The book tells the complete company story. “Dalmine” published it itself, for its 50th anniversary.
It is beautiful – expensively bound, elaborately printed. I’m sure it was a present for valued employees
or customers.

Raymond—So a hymn.

Related publication

II

Works of James Beckett with constant interjections by Frank Key

The publication accompanying the Belgian Pavilion at the next Venice Biennale, Personne et les autres borrow its title from a lost play by André Frankin, a Belgian art critic affiliated with the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals.

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