Charlotte Grace
Explorelab
The Architecture of the Contemporary Barricade
The Architecture of the Contemporary Barricade seeks to find ways that space can act against the state today. An exploration into the material and immaterial qualities of insurgent spaces and a breakdown of barricade-objects’ formal developments and increasing constraints, the project proposes the spectacle of barricades as mere ‘trojan horses’ for the urgent logistics of insurgent activity and looks to challenge the state at its spatial definition : the border.Using the site of Venice - border particularity, extreme spectacle, hollow corpse - as material and rhetorical facade, this insurgent space works not through blockage but through permeation. Passages weave through old waterways of the city to enable secret migrant passages from the Venetian lagoon into Fortress Europe, disguised by a spectacular Public Baths in the form of a pier without limits. Both ‘accepted other’ (tourist) and ‘rejected other’ (migrant) move towards the water through the same moment, space and gesture. Their nakedness amongst the steam of the baths and the spectacle of the framed city is both exposure and disguise.