Archiwik:About

Archiwik.org is a new online wiki being launched in November 2016 as part of the Galway, Ireland arts festival TULCA.

A collaboration between New York-based artist Mark Orange and Belfast-based curator Daniel Jewesbury, Archiwik defines as its area of focus a post-Bataillian approach to architecture and urbanism, taking as its starting point the French writer Georges Bataille's (1897-1962) renowned "Architecture" article. The project is being launched as a contributing artwork at TULCA, where curator Daniel Jewesbury's theme, 'The Headless City', has invited artists to propose projects that explore the predicament of the contemporary city which, “large or small … has become one vast financial instrument, an algorithm for producing and extracting profit...”

First published in the journal Documents in 1929 as part of series of texts forming a conjectural Dictionnaire Critique (Critical Dictionary), Bataille's article stressed the capacity of architecture to exert both literal and metaphorical power. Writing primarily of the monumental public buildings of the French church and state, he pointed out how architectural form itself can act as proxy for these institutions in ordering and prohibiting behavior. Architecture has the ability to manifest social hierarchy and political power, but can also affect and convey that power to those who walk in its shadow.

This definition of the architectural - as that which is ordered or ordering - extended, for Bataille, to any system, from the social to the psychological. In painting, it is evinced as classical composition and, in the most advanced painters working in the Paris of his day, Bataille saw a route out of the architectural injunction: by escaping form itself. With their radical distortions of human physiognomy, artists such as Picasso and Masson led the way in breaking down "architectural composition" and giving free rein to "psychological processes most incompatible with social stability".

The influence of the article on architects and theoreticians following the general rediscovery and reassessment of Bataille's writing by the post-structuralists in the 1960s has been far-reaching. Most notably Denis Hollier's elaboration of Bataille's central thesis, in La Prise de la Concorde (1974; published in English as Against Architecture in 1989), has insured an extended afterlife for the text. Hollier develops Bataille's premise by demonstrating the degree to which architectural terminology and its metaphors reach deeply into the construction of language itself, underpinning narratives of historical progress and much of the edifice of rational philosophy.

More recently, architect and writer Jill Stoner, in Toward A Minor Architecture (MIT Press, 2012) argues for the continued relevance of Bataille's text to the architectural and urban environment. Where, for Bataille (writing in Paris in the 1920's), the source of architectural authority was the church, the military and the judiciary, for Stoner, it is in the speculative redevelopment of our cities, and the corporate facades of the neo-liberal economy that we can see the blank face of today's financial and political elites: "... here in full force (though in radically different form) are the architectures of power that Bataille so precisely described seventy years ago. They place the argument for alternate and subversive spatial strategies squarely at our door step".

Archiwik.org will attempt to pull together some of these themes around the central starting point of Bataille's "Architecture" article. Built using MediaWiki, the same open-source wiki engine that powers Wikipedia, anyone will be able to contribute to the site - the creation and editing of articles will not require special tools or complex markup.

We invite architects, artists, writers, academics, and other interested parties to contribute to the project throughout its launch at TULCA 2016 and going forward thereafter. Articles can take as broad an approach to the central area of focus as contributors feel appropriate, from scholarly articles on the post-urban city, to investigations of the more lurid or bizarre side of architecture and the built environment. Possible categories might include: critical or literary texts central to the theme; minor architectures; artworks; architectural appropriations and misuses; haunted structures; architecture and crime; ruins and ancient architectures; the architect's body; gravity and entropy; human body/built environment interfacings; unauthored structures; architectural excess.

The choice of a wiki as format underlines the collaborative intentions for the project and proposes, in a playful way, an encyclopedic scope analogous to Bataille's Dictionnaire Critique. Bataille flouted the ideals of comprehensiveness and scholarly objectivity associated with the dictionary, cutting across conventional hierarchies and categories with a fragmentary choice of articles, ranging from Buster Keaton to spittle, factory chimneys to shellfish. The Dictionnaire reflected his editorial intention for Documents itself, as a "playful museum that simultaneously collects and reclassifies its specimens".

In the same spirit, Archiwik will foreground a wide-ranging, heterogeneous and unexpected take on its ostensible subject: playing architecture, as 'first of the arts', against its opposite: the vertiginous, the contingent, the minor, the infirm - all that acts counter to the edification of grand designs.