This program is presented in the Rooms for Books at the Chicago Architecture Biennial
As a launch celebration for SOILED’s new issue No. 7 - "Animatescrapers," the editors will host a participatory public workshop to create custom inserts for the new publication.
SOILED - No. 7 - Animatescrapers expands architecture’s subjectivity. Architecture is historically conceptualized as fixed, stationary, and inert. Alongside discussions that restrict subjectivity to humans, architectural discourse often positions buildings and cities as inanimate objects operated on by exclusively human actors. However, in today’s world, houses speak in first person via social media, caricatures of buildings stand in for complex forces of gentrification, and components of the built environment play the role of lead and supporting actors in films, theatre, and literature. This issue of SOILED tells stories that amplify architecture’s position as an animate actor—a companion to humans with its own representational, material, and ontological agency in the world.
Contributors to Animatescrapers include Andrew Schachman, Kevin Coval, Joyce Hwang, Deke Weaver, Office Andorus, Sneha Gantla, Adrianne Joergensen, and Matt Harlan.
Just as architecture might be conceptualized as an animate subject, so too, publications operate like living bodies, pulsing with flows of material, literary, and typographic inputs and outputs to communicate content with the world. This workshop invites you to create custom inserts for the new issue of SOILED that engage its specific content. Techniques including scanning, folding, stamping, copying, cropping, and cutting will be deployed to amplify the material vitality, fictional animism, and disciplinary virility of printed matter. All materials will be supplied.
About SOILED
SOILED is a periodical of architectural stories that makes a mess of the politics of space. Positioned between a literary journal and design magazine, SOILED narrates a playfully sincere and seriously humorous exploration of oft-overlooked dimensions of our built environment. We believe that by intensifying the fictive and storytelling potential in architecture, we might engage a broader public in architectural ideas, from discourse to action.
Based in Chicago, SOILED is edited, designed, and produced by Joseph Altshuler, Matthew Harlan, and Hollen Reischer. Visit www.soiledzine.org
