Potlatch call for materials

Open to: every architect or student of architecture under 30

Submission deadline: 1 December, 2013

Send to: fosburyarchitecture@gmail.com

Follow the project on: facebook.com/fosburyarchitecture

Materials required: production wastes that you have done during your internship, job or academic career – only useful in themselves – and disconnected from any proper architectural project.

What to do: send us a single .dwg file named as: POTLATCH_13_SURNAME NAME_NATIONALITY.dwg [you have to put your family name before]. Include in the file all the elements you want to share in the Potlatch ritual: elements of every scale, every level of detail and any kind of subject.

SOME EXAMPLES: a businessmen with his suitcase, an uninhibited women, autumn trees, empty parking lots, a carousel of the seventeenth century, a service stairs, elevators, terraces with tables and chairs, a Fiat 500, a happy family, people arguing, Cuban dictators, two homeless, Angela Merkel, disabled toilets, coffee grinders, heralds, tapestries, a waterfall, a runaway horse, a soccer ball, a club sandwich, a spoon, a cupcake, a wheelchair, a plinth, curtains, golf courses, street lamps on the roadside, the Death Star, a vaulted ceiling, a man in prayer, ET, electric cars, a space rocket, a secret door, a deer, a bathtub, the Temple of Karnak, snowflakes, gears, cumulonimbus, Mies Van Der Rohe smoking, a tea service, ferns, a triumphal arch ,a round arch, Maradona, a little black dress, the Flying Dutchman, the Barcelona chair, a roller coaster, a Valkyrie, a prostitute, a four-poster bed, a birthday card ,the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, a clothes-horse, a Tyrannosaurus rex and a Diplodocus, a discussion on the sea ,a Russian satellite, the Halley’s Comet, la Tourette, one of the many handle of Siza, pigeons, crows, cornucopias ,Zeus, gargoyles ,a sunny day …

Anything you have thrown in those file that you are now trying to forget; the uglier they are the more they are welcome.

Reward: donors will receive a special present from Fosbury Architecture, free access to the ultimate .dwg drawing and will be prominently listed on the thanks page of the project website as well as within every possible exhibition.

Description: our aim is to carry out a huge and autopoietic drawing. We want to celebrate a real potlatch -as an opportunity of unselfish dilapidation- to reaffirm our fragile status in the contemporary context.

That of the “architect under 30” is undoubtedly a marginal condition: a residual position that leads him to render his services – for very short time spans- to multiple employers. The trainee enters into fast and perverse processes of production in which he has absolutely no control and in which he only develops fragments that are often set aside or abandoned; enriching -rather than himself- a catalogue of scraps, an archive of horrors.

Precisely by the growing awareness of this ineluctable collection, it arise our proposal to short-circuit the order of things. With the waste we play: trying to dodge the self-pity and to anesthetize the anger. We play a game that is beautiful since it is really apotropaic, in which it sublimates the grotesque nature of our condition with thoughtful detachment.

The cadavres become exquis elements of a landscape that is generated by the juxtaposition and repetition of elements without a precise order, a design without a clear destiny. Anyone in our condition is called to participate by donating his or her share of waste. Everybody is invited to the banquet, where remains disintegrate because really donated, exploited, abused, consumed without any speculative logic.

Our group, as a recipient of a process generated by a network of interns, will limit itself to assemble a large schizophrenic composition. We will start from our luggage, enriching it with what will be sent by friends, acquaintances, or strangers that somewhere – all over the world – are drawing yet another completely useless tree with all its leaves.

potlatch [ˈpɒtˌlætʃ]

1. (Social Science / Anthropology & Ethnology) Anthropol a competitive ceremonial activity among certain North American Indians, esp the Kwakiutl, involving a lavish distribution of gifts and the destruction of property to emphasize the wealth and status of the chief or clan

2. US and Canadian informal a wild party or revel

[from Chinook, from Nootka patshatl a giving, present]