STUTTGART.- This is a project about laughing and architecture. About how the architecture of institutions upholds acts of power, and above all, about how laughing has the potential to scupper those acts of power. It is, in other words, about laughter’s destituent potential to cause the performance of power to fail, by vacating its “conditions of felicity” in a prodigious roar of collective laughter. Today, the house is burning – the whole house, all the houses – and the only ones laughing are the arsonists. Laughing not at the flames or the charred ruins but at having reduced the rest of us to a state of stunned spectatorship and acquiescence to the Strange Event (whatever it may be). This project is about repurposing laughter and architecture – about laughing while the house is burning.
It follows the story of a collective of architects – not really architects, but not not architects either – who by the time the project is complete will have assembled a Destituent Laughing Choir, a community of laughers made up of any and all who are able and desirous to laugh together inappropriately. The laughter is inappropriate because it unleashes the blasphemous, desacralizing potential of laughing on acts of power invariably clad in institutional legitimacy. Though normatized, can these acts of power withstand the profane scrutiny of a chorus of destituent laughing? What if performative speech acts and the fiats of power they instantiate were greeted by nothing but great peals of laughter?
At the entrance to this atmosphere of destituent hilarity, a film retraces the coming together of this community bonded by laughter, documenting by anticipation the assembly of the laughing choir at the project’s core, which is to come together to laugh publicly over the coming months at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and beyond – way beyond! Dozens of laughing bubbles – three-dimensional renderings of those found in comic strips, used by the choir members to train and underscore their gestures – fill the gallery space, which has become a rehearsal studio for the choir as they prepare for the collective joy of laughing publicly. Want to take back the power of laughter? Fed up with the arsonists monopolizing laughter while the house burns? Want to debunk the normalized seriousness of acts of instituted power? Join us and start laughing destituently. Join the Destituent Laughing Choir! All welcome! No previous laughing experience necessary!
-ATI is an architecture collective born in Rome in 2013, working at the intersection of architecture, institutional critique, philosophy and performative research. Using art as a research method for urban enquiry, the collective considers interaction and relationality as the basis of all artistic process. The group has collaborated for many years with the Department of Space and Design strategies in University of Arts Linz, Austria, whose students are performing as founding members of the first Destituent Laughing Choir on October 23 and 24 in Stuttgart.
Curated by Tamarind Rossetti & Stephen Wright
