Mono.Kultur #36: Ricardo Bofill.

mono.kultur #36
RICARDO BOFILL: THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

“I’m interested in my own history of errors.”

‘It is enough to say that Ricardo Bofill is one of Europe’s most famous and prolific architects of the last century. To add any more is to inevitably leave out too much.’ With these words we begin the journey of our new issue mono.kultur #36 into the mind and work of Spanish architect and enfant terrible Ricardo Bofill.

And indeed, where to begin with an architect as over the top as Ricardo Bofill, notorious since the 1970s for his vast city-like housing estates that look like surreal experiments in crossbreeding desert caves with Star Wars; an architect who has designed over 1000 projects in the space of five decades, from perfume bottles to city plans, and pretty much everything in between; who has worked in a style – or a hundred styles – that is as unique as it is impossible to describe; who founded a leftist collective that would eventually end up building airport terminals; whose life reads somewhat like a fairytale itself, taking us from fascist Spain under Franco’s rule to the celebrity frenzy of our modern times, with the Bofill clan holding a somewhat unique position among Spanish tabloids? To add any more is to inevitably leave out too much.

In short, Ricardo Bofill is a gloriously fascinating character with a penchant for the extra-large, in life as well as in work, and we are terribly pleased to dedicate mono.kultur #36 to the Spanish master.

With mono.kultur, Ricardo Bofill talked about fifty years of architecture, the vagaries of ambition and how Modernism killed the city.

Visually, the issue offers a disorienting journey of architectural splendour with plenty of previously unpublished images from the archives of Ricardo Bofill (as well as the odd film still of naked bodies). Using partial high gloss varnish throughout, it is a pleasing juxtaposition of the natural and the artificial, the intellectual and the sexual, the rigorous and the decadent.

Spring 2014 / English / 15 x 20 cm / 48 Pages
Introduction & Interview by Carson Chan
Images courtesy of Taller de Arquitectura
Design by Vela Arbutina & John McCusker
Publisher: Kai von Rabenau

Price: € 5.00

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Higher Atlas/Au-delà de l’Atlas
The Marrakech Biennale [4] in Context

Edited by Carson Chan and Nadim Samman

With texts by Carson Chan, Anthony Gardner, Kerryn Greenberg, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Beral Madra, Simon Njami, Katarzyna Pieprzak, Alice Planel, Holiday Powers, Véronique Rieffel, Nadim Samman, and Jessica Winegar

Higher Atlas: The Marrakech Biennale in Context [4] brings together a collection of texts that dilates on the social and historical context, history, and contemporary reality of exhibition making in North Africa and in particular, Morocco. For Chan and Samman, the exhibition is the primary locus of artistic information; firsthand experience of the work is the best way to understand it. The catalogue, published in English and French, with an Arabic online edition to follow, is intended to provide a context for the exhibition within preexisting and future frameworks for understanding some of the considerations that went into this edition of the Marrakech Biennale.

Further contributions by Aleksandra Domanović, Alex Schweder La & Khadija Carroll La, Alexander Ponomarev, Andrew Ranville, Anri Sala, Barkow Liebinger Architects, Centre des Arts Contemporains Marrakech, Le Cube and Collectif Island 6, Christopher Mayo, CocoRosie, Elín Hansdóttir, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Eva Grubinger, Faouzi Laatiris, Felix Kiessling, Finnbogi Pétursson, Florian & Michael Quistrebert, Hadley & Maxwell, Hassan Darsi, Joe Clark, Jon Nash, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Jürgen Mayer H., Karthik Pandian, Katarzyna Przezwańska, Katia Kameli, Leung Chi Wo, Luca Pozzi, Matthew Stone & Phoebe Collings-James, Megumi Matsubara, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Roger Hiorns, Sinta Werner, Sophie Erlund, Tue Greenfort, Younes Baba-Ali, and Jamaa.

Design by John McCusker and Sara Hartman

D 20€

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Text by Carson Chan; introduction by Martin Hochleitner

Over the past few years, Eva Grubinger’s work has investigated the definition of public, institutional, and museum spaces through installations and objects. In these works, ruptures or breaks in the assumed function of space or site-specific installations, as well as those involving the allocation of content to employed forms, play a significant role.

Decoy documents the eponymous exhibition at Landesgalerie Linz in 2011 in which Grubinger presented large-scale sculptural works, all of which referenced the fishing—lures, mooring rings, a dock—and both subtly and explicitly engaged a vocabulary of the alluring. The catalogue includes an introduction by Martin Hochleitner and an essay by Carson Chan.

Design by Manuel Raeder

D 22€

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And The Seasons; They Go Round and Round. 0047 Press

As the final installment to the two exhibitions curated by Carson Chan in the spring of 2010, 0047 is proud to announce the launch of And the Seasons; They Go Round and Round, the catalog to the exhibitions of the same names. Featuring essays by New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten, artist and writer Patricia Reed, and economist Amin Samman, the catalog seeks to expand the investigation of the overall geometry of our social, aesthetic and economic life that was initiated by the exhibitions. The catalog is designed by young design group Vaguely Contemporary (John McCusker & Sara Hartman).

Published by 0047 (Oslo), 2011.
144 Pages
English

D €15

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Fillip #13
Contributors: Antonia Hirsh, Jan Verwoert, Candice Hopkins, Carson Chan, Anthony Downey, Jeff Khonsary, Claire Tancons and Jesse McKee, Lisa Marshall, Haema Sivanesan, Ryan Trecartin and Kristina Lee Podesva.

D 12€

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Available for distribution.