Mark Pimlott

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Amidst the profound ‘homelessness’ that is produced as a desired default condition within neoliberalism, where there is only within, a shelter without purpose has become an urgent necessity. The all-over condition of urbanisation fused with the boundless reach and demands of neoliberal capitalism has created a continuous interior––for Peter Sloterdijk, a ‘world interior of capital’––in which the realms outside the spaces of speculation and production, and the concomitant spaces of consumption, are not allowed to lay dormant or unproductive. These, too, must become spaces of extraction, spaces in which consumption reigns all-seeing, all-pervasive. One’s time must be commanded; one’s attention must be always held. Every idle moment is exploited as a market opportunity, a gateway to individual desires within a system of surveillance, where those desires are transformed into engagement and then capital, and one’s measure of worth is elided with one’s connection to a currency of commodities.

 

A space that refuses the algorithms fitted to nuances of taste of individuals, one that cannot be absorbed, commanded, branded, sold as anything other than a space outside the circuit of consumption is, by necessity, an empty space, or one disburdened of obligation. It is a space that one can hardly imagine existing any longer, so often it is called upon for action, as a market, a space for spectacle, a zone for ‘performance’. But this space has existed, usually protected by some institution that allows ‘nonhappenings’ to happen, naturally. These spaces found currency in the 1970s as embodiments of political and cultural critique, housed within larger structures, from Frank van Klingeren’s ‘T Karregat outside Eindhoven, to Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC-Fábrica Pompéia or the undercroft of MASP in Sao Paulo, Peter Celsing’s Kulturhuset in Stockholm, and the ground floor of Piano + Rogers’s Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; and recently, Robbrecht and Daem, with Marie-José Van Hee’s Stadshal in Gent. Their attachment to institutions is central. The institution acts as guarantor and protector of a space in which one can do nothing. People are both welcomed and legitimated within a space that is recognised 100as significant by a body that represents them. There was and remains a purpose to all these spaces: they were intended to be used by individuals and groups for leisure, and the pleasure of looking, acting, and relating to others; for being aware of themselves as citizens, and free to be so.