Accattone #1

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.

This first issue is an attempt to practice these aspirations: to experiment with editorial devices, like the interview by images; to publish documents by artists or architects without the mediation of a text; to limit the use of the critical essay (almost absent here, with the exception of the editorial and a short commentary on a project); to explore other forms of textuality (the journal, the interview, the technical report without literary ambitions); to represent projects not as a finished ‘products', but as part of a creative process, of a line of thought and even as a work in progress.Accattone #1 revolves around several themes, present at various degrees in each of the featured contents: representation and its shifting layers between reality and abstraction; visual culture and ready-made as a way to inspire a creative process; architecture design by the making, in a new combination between ideas and physical process; and finally the theme of the transformation, through architectural or curatorial operations, of objects like buildings, dismantled façades, 1:1 scale models, drawings and photographs.