Seventh Lisbon Architecture Triennale

Weight, the element at the core of How heavy is a city?, is one of the largest elephants in this cumbersome, deranged and dystopic room called the Anthropocene, which humanity created for itself and others. It is unquestionable that there has been a global and massive redistribution of weight upon the surface of the Earth, caused by the all the materials that have been, and continue to be, extracted, mined, transformed, produced, repurposed and rearranged by and for all sorts of human activities. 

The way people live, circulate, consume, produce and pollute has immense consequences for the composition and stability of the planet as a whole. Some of these are visible — and indeed the Anthropocene is also an aesthetic issue — while others are less so. Such is the case of weight, in its different manifestations. If the effects of human-led action are finally widely acknowledged as a major source of disturbance and transformation of the Earth, conditioning the lives and environments of all those living in it, there are still few studies about the effects that these global movements of transposition and rearrangement of masses and weights may have upon the planet. 

Urban spaces can be seen as large sacrificial zones, concentrating human dwellings and activities and consolidating the idea of nature as a detached and exotic expression of life. At the same time, they are incubators of new possibilities and test sites for conceiving otherwise. In parallel, if we consider that weight is not only the expression of a body’s mass but also the downward force that this body produces, simply by existing, and that the pressure it is capable of generating may have an overall effect on the planet, how is pressure acting as an agent of transformation upon our present-future world? 

Pressure is an entity both produced and felt. It is a continuous force made on or against something it is in contact with. As such, pressure is also a key figure of relation: in order for weight to manifest itself, the body that detains it needs to be in contact with another body, it needs to touch it. 

Together, these two masses enter into a process of negotiation in which they must agree upon the kind of tension that they give and receive, and how this tension will condition and transform their own existence and form. Soft bodies may bend. Hard bodies may break. Bodies with a good memory may be forever transformed. Bodies with a short memory may return to their usual shape once this tension has been removed. Many will never be the same. 

It is therefore not a linguistic coincidence that pressure is also a figure of persuasion and intimidation. Pressure is what makes something or someone to do something. It is an agent of influence, of action and of coercion. If someone or something can’t avoid or resist pressure, they bend and break. This response to pressure produces both fundamental and tragic results. Pressure turns sand into glass and glass into interfaces. Pressure turns water into electricity and electricity into light. Pressure turns air into sound and sound into music. 

Pressure turns grapes into wine and wine into euphoria. Too much or too little blood or nervous pressure may have catastrophic effects on an organism. But the right balance creates harmony and attunement between bodies and things.

Talk Talk Talk Curator