Victor Sardenberg

In September 2021, we decided to look back at the models produced at dMA Hannover during the covid crisis. I co-curated and co-organized the exhibition at the Leibniz University Hannover.As architectural models and physical prototypes seem to have lost relevance in online formats and remote work, we would like to reinforce their importance in our design process. They are rigorous devices for iteratively developing architectural ideas and inventing novel methods of making. The exhibition showcases physical objects made of a range of materials from ones familiar to the building industry, like wood and aluminium, to unfamiliar ones, like foam, wool, or nylon. The fabrication techniques utilized range from established ones such as CNC-cutting, laser-sintering, and 3d-printing to techniques that are currently being developed at dMA, like robotic wire-cutting, needle felting, and autonomous mobile platform thread positioning. It’s all a blur, is as much stock-taking as an outlook of post-pandemic prototyping.  

Estranhando o Real - Realizando o Estranho, São Paulo, 2017 - 12th August to 10th September Roles: Co-curator, organizer and exhibitor. The catalogue can be found here. The reality is a strange place. Events that seemed impossible to happen succeed unceasingly: Brexit, Islamic State, Donald Trump, mass immigration, Michel Temer, the Army at Espírito Santo’s streets, Artificial Intelligence, bubble algorithms in social media, Vladimir Putin, Global Warming, the Anthropocene, pictures that looks like renderings… If, as the architect and theorist David Ruy argues, Architecture is by excellence the field that produces the image of reality today and in the future, speculative projects are able to produce new ways of living and to project in the future the implications of our choices of today. Projects like the Fun Palace, by Cedric Price, Plug-in City, by Archigram, Continuous Monument, by Superstudio, No Stop City, by Archizoom, were instrumental to imagine and consequently to build our own habitat. The curatorial goal is to explore how architects and artists are able to produce ideas about radical ways of being through their own media: drawings, models and words. In moments of crisis, when it seems there’s no alternatives and nothing really changes, to produce the image of new forms of re-existence is a radical act.