Architecture and Society 2022
The program section Architecture and Society curated by Lotte Schreiber gathers films that focus on different models of social coexistence in interaction with architecture.
“[ ] you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody,” writes Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1755 in the introduction to his “Discourse on Inequality”, in which he indicates a cultural breach that had already manifested with the development of the first civilizations: Land in prehistoric societies had been used collectively, whereas the Age of Antiquity already knew private land ownership. A careless, solely capital-driven land consumption has since transformed the surface of our planet to an alarming degree. Profitoriented agricultural use adversely affects soil fertility, ongoing soil sealing contributes to global warming and changes the natural water balance. It is in cities in particular that land is more and more aggressively threatened by the neoliberal forays of profit-oriented real estate speculators, with the resulting housing crisis becoming an existential crisis for an increasing number of people. Against this backdrop and inspired by the exhibition “Boden für Alle” at afo architekturforum oberösterreich, this year’s program section Architecture and Society is dedicated to the “land issue”, presenting four films – the French long-term documentary The Spark, La Restanza by Italian director Alessandra Coppola, A Pile of Ghosts, by Singapore-based Austrian filmmaker Ella Raidel and The Art of Inconsequentiality that constitutes a kind of meta film for this program – that take a multifaceted look at the economic, ecological, and social importance of land, our basis of life.
