The Opportunity of Monstrosity
A conversation between Jonathan Mosley and arts-based research collective The Third Thing (Nithya Iyer and Vlad Mizikov), this talk is focussed on a short video work entitled 'An Experiment in Intervals III - Violet Desert', made on-site at the former Companhia União Fabril industrial plant in Barreiro, Portugal. Using performance and image, the work explores how bodily interventions can allow for alternative readings of sites of 'monstrous architecture'. As such, the conversation commences from Georges Bataille's reflection on the architectures of modernity - the smokestack, the freeway, the industrial plant - as representing a 'disorder under god', or a 'monstrous' apparition. It also draws on the work's reference to Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 film Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) and its relevance to contemporary critiques of capitalist ideology.
An Experiment in Intervals III - Violet Desert, is accessible for public viewing here until 31st of July 2024.
Jonathan Mosley is one half of Warren and Mosley, a contemporary artist / architect collaboration operating at the intersection of conceptual art, architecture and more recently the psycho-social. He is also Associate Professor of Architecture and Experimental Practice at Bristol UWE.
The Third Thing (PT/AUS) is an arts-based research collaboration seeking to investigate experimental methodologies in the negotiation, actualisation and instrumentalisation of the body in space. Their research and practice seeks to conjoin philosophical provocations with embodied interventions in sites of architectural significance.