Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber

The Making of Autogestion. Occupy Ideologies.

b/w large-scale wall paper, 300 x 400 cm, 2013

The wall paper work The Making of Autogestion combines images of the urban spaces along Rome`s Via Casilina which were sites of popular appropriation and self-organisation – acts that shaped the built and social landscape. The composite of images from Valle Borghesiana, the Pantanella building, and from the Ri-Pubblica initiative at the Cinema America is structured by a layer of abstract shapes alluding to a handmade etching, The Assassination of Architecture, by Italian architect Aldo Rossi (1974). This etching was dedicated to architecture theorist Manfredo Tafuri and is a response to his critique in Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (1973/1976) of the failed ideological functions of architecture and planning. Redeployed in the wall paper, the abstract figure recalls the contentious debate about the necessity of taking apart and demystifying the ‘hopes’ of architectural design and planning to keep open the imagination of possible forms of autogestion or of ‘self-made urbanity’ within uneven and ever-changing urban conditions.