SoA Exhibit: “We Play You Play”
Curated by Giancarlo Mazzanti with Milou Teeling
April 29 - May 5
“We Play You Play” is an exhibition into the methods in which the office engages the discipline of architecture in a specific way. The exhibition is broken down into two parts, the documentation of the projects (composed of four videos) and an installation focused on the concept of playing: The project documentation is a way to introduce the visitor to the work of Mazzanti Arquitectos. This provides the participant with a set of references as well as creates a base knowledge of the projects. We show those modifications the project has on its own and those that happened by being linked to the context.
The narrative is structured by establishing categories of play, such as "How We Play: Landscapes", etc...The project documentation is further enriched by the game that acts as an intersection between categories. This conceptual hinge, provides the visitor with pieces based on the massing forms made at a scale that allows them to be used and reshaped. For most, the act of playing or engaging in games provides an experience that is different to the familiarity of the everyday. Be it for sport or leisure, athletic or intellectual, the stimulation that accompanies these acts has the ability to project ones awareness into an alternate reality.
To play, presents a moment in which fiction provides the participant an environment to think, dream or act. A key element to the game is active participation. A child sitting in a wagon is not playing the same as the one pulling it as fast he can down the street. The game in that sense is a cool medium. Those who participate have the chance to become or learn something different. Rules are the structure for the game and it is here that people develop strategies and methods of interaction for relating to the pieces and content of the game, a surfer and her wave, a card player and his opponents or a petanque player and the ground.
The unforeseen outcome aids in the development of intuitions, behaviors and techniques that allow the players to negotiate a given context while adjusting their awareness. Through the structured freedom of the game, a fresh understanding of their contemporary condition is provided to the players. How to act, how to move or how to work. What is learned in this alternate space has the ability to influence the quotidian spaces of the everyday by providing an understanding into the flexibility of systems and the limit of operations.
Through this, a redefinition of perspective can occur in the way of environmental, cultural or social. The rules of our game are the strategies and explorations we develop in the office as part of our architectural design process. How something folds, circulates, masses, programs, or communicates, etc... Making a piece, a system, and an adaptable configuration is how We Play. The outcome or impact may not always be clear, but it is in how You Play.
