Evasive Harmony
A Video Installation @ ZEMIN Art Space, Berlin, 2024
ARCHITECTURE: Yuval Baer
VIDEO: Maor (@new_maoritsyoo) michaelove
SOUND: Ziv Barashi
The Four Seasons is a video installation, which creates a space, founded on the fourfold - North, South, East and West. It reconstructs a platonic space, inspired by the Kabbalist text - Book of Creation, which reveals a world structured on a consciousness of letters, numbers (spheres) and narratives (histories). The work explores possible evolutions of structures with expanded vocabulary – an Architecture that relinquishes control, adapts to narratives, and is capable of negotiating multiple relationships founded on complex mathematical scripts.
The Seasons represent the four Platonic elements of Fire, Water, Earth and Air. In the age of the Anthropocene, as we have learned to dominate these elements, we have also managed to destabilize the foundations of the universe. As entitled consumers, we suddenly begin to experience Fire as a force that burns and consumes, Water as a force that washes away stability, Earth as a form of stagnation and death, and Air as evaporating emptiness. What we seem to have forgotten is that Fire is also the force of emanation, abundance and creation; Water is the source of life, flow and growth; Earth is the foundation of ecological stability and Air is the force of idealism and spirituality.
ARCHITECTURE: Yuval Baer
VIDEO: Maor (@new_maoritsyoo) michaelove
SOUND: Ziv Barashi
A Video Installation @ the ECC, Venice Biennale 2023
The Four Seasons
The Four Seasons is a video installation, which creates a space, founded on the fourfold - North, South, East and West. It reconstructs a platonic space, inspired by the Kabbalist text - Book of Creation, which reveals a world structured on a consciousness of letters, numbers (spheres) and narratives (histories). The work explores possible evolutions of structures with expanded vocabulary – an Architecture that relinquishes control, adapts to narratives, and is capable of negotiating multiple relationships founded on complex mathematical scripts.
The Seasons represent the four Platonic elements of Fire, Water, Earth and Air. In the age of the Anthropocene, as we have learned to dominate these elements, we have also managed to destabilize the foundations of the universe. As entitled consumers, we suddenly begin to experience Fire as a force that burns and consumes, Water as a force that washes away stability, Earth as a form of stagnation and death, and Air as evaporating emptiness. What we seem to have forgotten is that Fire is also the force of emanation, abundance and creation; Water is the source of life, flow and growth; Earth is the foundation of ecological stability and Air is the force of idealism and spirituality.
ARCHITECTURE: Yuval Baer
VIDEO: Maor (@new_maoritsyoo) michaelove
A Video Installation @ the ECC, Venice Biennale 2021
Architecture in the Age of the Anthropocene
Our presentation here is a result of two particular Architectural experiments which we have conducted in 2016. Our proposal for the Green Food Development Center in Shenzhen, China, and our proposal for the Kaunas Science Museum in Lithuania, were both attempts to generate Architectural hybrids which are both artificial and natural. Unlike similar attempts in the past, which sought to reinstate a ceasefire with the Earth, we were looking now for a way to define new relationships, characterized by structures and tectonic language that merge, blend and unify. We are in a search for a new harmony in which Architecture and Nature can be experienced as one.
Our Architectural heritage always taught us to rely on orders that are based on mathematics, geometry and technical feasibility. Meaningful Architecture has always emerged when a particular structure could be simultaneously seen as a particular tectonic formation in time and space in a concrete location, while at the same time exist in a universal field of consciousness.
Being aware of that, we began exploring possible relationships between structural language and the formations of nature. Initially, we relied on the Cartesian grid ingrained in our minds as a progressive matrix of our consciousness. However, gradually we developed ways to relax the structural grid and morph into more organic and curvilinear geometries. The relatively neutral quality of the geometry of the Cartesian grid, enabled us to relax and pronounce its presence as needed. We proposed extremely simple structures with clean rational linear layout in plan and curvilinear articulations in section to allow our structures to blend with the topography of the "natural" surroundings.
We want to introduce a new harmonious condition in which, man, machine and nature coexist. Our structures, in their exteriority, are nothing but landscapes; in their interiority however, there's a created space which blends the two, both physically and imaginary.
