Archiwik:About

Archiwik.org is a new online wiki launching in November 2016 as part of the Galway, Ireland-based arts festival TULCA. Festival curator Daniel Jewesbury has proposed his theme, "The Headless City," as a jumping-off point for a wide range of art projects and events that might: "inform and shape our thinking about the city, through their ability to make us aware of certain problems and ongoing unresolved contradictions, by dramatising our unease about the city, or by generating that unease."

Initiated by artist Mark Orange, 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 “Architecture” article.

First published in the journal Documents in 1929 as part of series of texts forming a conjectural Dictionnaire Critique (Critical Dictionary), Bataille's “Architecture” 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.

The influence of the article on architects and theoreticians 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 neoliberal 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 aims to pull together some of these themes around the central starting point of Bataille's “Architecture” article.

We invite artists, architects, writers, academics, and all 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. Michael Richardson describes the Dictionnaire as “an edifice lacking architecture but emerging through the process of construction from the ground up”, and it is in this spirit that we hope the Archiwik project will take shape. Archiwik will foreground wide-ranging and unexpected takes on its ostensible subject of architecture and the built environment, and remain committed to 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.