Bernadette Krejs & Max Utech. Palace of Un/Learning: Glitching Mies

The never aging image of the Barcelona Pavilion by Lilly Reich with the help of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and its reconstruction from 1986 displays its fluid spaces and fake realities of a fictional manifesto of Modernism, presenting itself as a seemingly neutral, universal and self-referential architecture icon.

As an undisputed reference, the pavilion represents the dominant narrative of the architectural canon: spaces emptied of any domesticity, framed by hard and prestigious materials and homogenous staged elements of objects, people and stories around it.

But every building narrative has its accidents, cracks and glitches that can unleash “phantomed stories” [Jaque, 2020]. Glitching Mies embraces these blurring moments of counter visibility through occupying and irritating the well-known spatial and visual setting of the Pavilion, by transitioning its materiality, its boundaries and hierarchies.

Thereby queering is introduced as a spatial practice for the “enactment of architecture” [Bonnevier, 2007], which implies the possibility to move, to interpret and to open static conditions of the Pavilion by disturbing the order of things [Ahmed, 2006]. This transformation is a joyful act as Paul B. Preciado states, “the crossing is a place of uncertainty, of the unobvious, of strangeness. It is not a weakness, but a power” [Preciado, 2020].

Glitching Mies creates an in-between moment showing the transformative potential of otherness and multiplicity by un/learning and re/claiming the status quo. An ambiguous glitch where questions arise: What‘s good? Who is we? Whose histories are told?

During Model and in the framework of LINA, there will be several interventions at the Barcelona Pavilion, that glitch the usual visual reproduction of the pavilion, interrupt peoples’ flows through space and provoke moments of questioning hegemonic references in today‘s architecture. Let‘s overcome the submissiveness!

Glitching Mies is therefore a feminist, participatory action, “a form of refusal” [Russell, 2020] of a dominant and exclusionary knowledge production and distribution. So everybody is invited to be an accomplice by bringing a small object to the Pavilion and place it in the closet of embodied knowledge and thereby become part of the exhibition. A Cozy (Radical) Salon on the 27^th of April will be the initial point where guests will be able to cruise through the installations, share stories on Lily’s bed and discuss their dissident experiences with hosts Bernadette Krejs and Max Utech.