ADS10: Savage Architecture — Theatres of Common Life

ADS10 continued to explore the idea of a Savage Architecture. An architecture that is not merely shelter and comfort, nor display and reproduction of wealth, but rather is assumed to be the material and symbolic basis of mankind’s necessity to come together and engage in collective rituals.

We searched for those unexpected urban conditions and collective rituals – as forms of resistance – that continuously surface within the flow without end of urbanisation. These rituals of exchange and production of knowledge demand an architectural project that could host and represent them in the public sphere as alternative examples of collective life.

This year ADS10 explored the theatre as a form of construction and representation of a community, where sacred, ludic, or dramatic representation of conflicts are used as didactic tools to build social practices. By explicitly exposing the common structure of life in the performative act, the theatre defines a truly political space, where individual existence acquires a meaning in relationship with a collective body of needs, desires, and actions.

This relationship between stage, performance, and audience extends to the scale of the city, which is understood as the stratification of theatrical spaces that constitute and represent a multitude of collective subjects. The political life of these unstable subjects demands the permanent stage of architecture in order to be internally recognised by the community, and, at the same time, outwardly represented in the public sphere. Challenging the canonical understanding of theatres as cultural institutions of entertainment, ADS10 has imagined theatres of the everyday that would emancipate common lives from the ubiquitous, repetitive, and oppressive standards of urbanisation.