Athanasios (Nasi) Lazarou and Venetia Rigoni
Friday 13 December – 25 January 2025
In the window
Mon-Thu 9am-7pm
Fri 9am – 9pm
Sat-Sun 9am – 5pm
Closing event: Friday 24 January 2025
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution…Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”
(Paul Virilio, Philippe Petit, Sylvère Lotringer (1999). “Politics of the Very Worst”, Semiotext)
We are surrounded by destruction. In Ukraine, Gaza, and Lebanon, missiles turn buildings into rubble, dust and death. Yet in Australia, the housing crisis turns buildings into real estate placards and profits as housing becomes increasingly commercialised. Either bombed or sold, both are forms of destruction: material destruction as one extreme, and social destruction as the other. As architectural workers these oscillations of spatial violence extend practices of building towards unbuilding. Destruction, thus, becomes a corollary of construction; a symmetry in which the analogy of building/un-building can be observed through complex and extended processes of transformation. What emerges through the built form’s loss of autonomy is a means to think of practices of destruction as an ontological causality; a process of violent transformation that extends the knowledge of building to its destruction, constructing un-building and its material articulations as a source of architectural knowledge.
‘Practices of Destruction’ attempts to grasp these articulations with a series of architectural modelling and fabrication propositions exploring the building/unbuilding of the front gallery wall of ‘The Little Machine’.
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Athanasios (Nasi) Lazarou is a philosopher of Architecture whose work explores the relationship between politics and space to interrogate arenas of spatial violence. He is a Lecturer in architectural history and theory at the University of Adelaide, curating and contributing to public events across architecture, art and design practice. He holds a belief in the power of architecture and art as a force for shaping culture.
Venetia Rigoni is an architectural worker interested in architecture’s dependency on the relationship between representation and building.
Photography: Sam Roberts
