Art Metropole

30 Nov. 2018

Scapegoat Issue 11, LIFE

Publisher

Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political

Time

7:30pm

Join Scapegoat Journal at MOCA and Art Metropole for the launch of Scapegoat Issue 11: LIFE

Nov. 30th, 7:30pm-8:30pm
Ground floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Toronto, 158 Sterling Rd.

Discussion with Scapegoat editors and issue contributors

Scapegoat Issue 11: LIFE

Architectural modernity is an emphatically secular modernity that imagines itself to have been recently liberated from an age in which architecture was a metaphysical discipline, and whose architectural forms were constrained by the metaphysical requirements of the king or the church.

Today, architects do not see themselves as metaphysicians, and yet there is unfinished metaphysical business at the core of the modern project that continually undermines this narrative of liberation. Hidden within the new rationalist core of architectural modernity is the old western metaphysical distinction between life and non-life — the living and the non-living — which in the 21st century has increasingly become a site of political struggle in the built environment, linking struggles over reproductive rights, environmental justice, climate change, archaeology, and urban design.

In the LIFE issue we find evidence of architecture’s ongoing metaphysical work in the use of architectural building codes as a tool to limit women’s reproductive choices in Texas, the US military’s conversion of the Aleutian archipelago into its own private radiation sensor, the management of racialized ghosts in Indonesian squatter settlements, the rise of neo-vitalist urbansim in Europe, and the introduction of the logic of automation into burial practices in Tokyo.

Contributors include Alexander Arroyo, Maros Krivy, Rosemary Joyce, Craig Damion Smith, Will Fu, Sanford Kwinter, Noah Scheinman, Larissa Belcic and Michelle Shofet, Fan Wu, Rouzbeh Akhbari and David Schnitman, Micah Lexier, Oliver Vilela, Joe Culpepper, Matthew Allen, Michael Fisch and Erez Golani Solomon, George Johannes and Lori Brown and Eliza McCullough, and Adam Bobbette.

SCAPEGOAT: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy is an independent, not-for-profit, bi-annual journal designed to create a context for research and development regarding design practice, historical investigation, and theoretical inquiry.

As a mytheme, the figure of the scapegoat carries the burden of the city and its sins. Walking in exile, the scapegoat was once freed from the constraints of civilization. Today, with no land left unmapped, and with processes of urbanization central to political economic struggles, SCAPEGOAT is exiled within the reality of global capital. The journal examines the relationship between capitalism and the built environment, confronting the coercive and violent organization of space, the exploitation of labour and resources, and the unequal distribution of environmental risks and benefits. Throughout our investigation of design and its promises, we return to the politics of making as a politics to be constructed.

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