Accattone#5

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.

Based entirely on the work of Armin Linke, Accattone #5 explores photography in relation to the major architecture of public and private institutions: the infrastructure of the Roman Empire, neoclassical Athens, the United Nations headquarters, neo-liberal corporate environments and the fragile European institutions in Brussels.
Monuments are carefully crafted to convey determined sets of aesthetic codes and political values, incorporated in a purportedly eternal and total character. Photography can challenge the power of such representations by bringing out their inherent glitches, small cracks and everyday ambiguities. It can reprogramme architecture.