Accattone #3

Accattone is a dedicated space for architecture documents: an interview, a visual essay, a drawing, are laid out as fragments of a montage transversal to the issue. Contents are manipulated mostly through their visual condition. From their sheer confrontation, several themes emerge. The implicit, allusive character of the analogy is preferred to the over-determination of the text, especially of the essay format. Exploring these editorial possibilities is an attempt to go beyond the simplistic assumption that only text-based magazines are "critical" and that our visually-oriented cultural condition is necessarily un- or post-critical.Away from the fast and oblivious mechanism of production-consumption of the web, the printed format and its slow periodicity combine the characteristics of the work-in-progress with the finiteness of the object.

 

Accattone #3 is a single content magazine specially produced for The Corner Show. Both an autonomous object and a continuation of Accattone #2, it consists in a 96 x 64 cm poster foldable into an 8-page publication. Martinez Barat Lafore collect 137 images and quotations inherent to their conceptual and built work, through sketch-up renderings, scanned drawings, professional photographs or mobile phone shots. The corner is a transversal theme to their practice: line, form, way of living, it becomes wedge, moulding and skirting board, inalienable furniture, partitioning wall. The architects embrace the everyday with the gaze sharpened by meaningful fragments of their experience — forms to be analysed, conceptualised and re-used as architectural operators.

Accattone #3 is featured in The Corner Show. Corners are everywhere at Extra City Kunsthal, Eikelstraat 25, 2600 Antwerpen from September 11th to December 6th. It's also presented at Artists Print at the BRASS on September 12th and 13th.