2015

'Negative Space: A Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa' - Belgian Pavillion 56th Venice Bienale

Works

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.

These small models, however, reference not the actual buildings, but rather their negative spaces, alluding to the buildings’ potential for illegal expansion of living or workspaces.

 

This “Clandestine building”, he shows, can only be successful if an edifice contains unprofitable residual spaces. Despite its functionalist principles, even Modernist architecture does not always use a building’s volumes in the most economical way. It is, for example, possible to discover usable space in wide balconies, spacious entrances and the like, to claim it by bricking the space off from the elements—and in doing so, enlarging one’s private property.

 

His Scenario Generator moves incessantly in its reordering of blocks, perpetually suggesting new configurations for little-used space. The combination of mechanical and digital technologies normally used in the warehouses of companies such as Amazon here offers an alternative means of organizing volume. In a dystopian scenario, it refers to the shifting spaces and informal architectures resulting from the postcolonial situation. Ultimately both absurd and futuristic, entrusting architectural redeployment to a machine advocates for a simplification and streamlining of illegal or informal practices—in its repetition, a Sisyphean task without conclusion.

 

The installation points to how progressive architecture was put to use in post-independence nation-building projects, but also caricatures the exploitation of the resources that feuled Western industrial development, automation being a kind of apotheosis of capitalist efficiency and speed.

 

Katerina Gregos – 2015

"Negative Space: A Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa" (2015)

James Beckett Negative Space

"Negative Space: A Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa" (2015)

"Negative Space: A Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa" (2015)

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Negative Space: A Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa" (research component, MCAD Manila 2018)

"Negative Space: A Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa" (research component, MCAD Manila 2018)

"Negative Space: A Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa" (research component, MCAD Manila 2018)

Photography: Alessandra Bello