Dear Reader,

It’s a commonplace to state that a substantial part of a person’s life now takes place online. Even for us, an institutional creature whose work is partly dependent on the study of objects and on the encounters and conversations that these objects can activate, it’s hard to imagine what it would mean to put our growing digital presence to sleep. For one thing, we wouldn’t know how to reach you.

But while we continue to embrace the apparent ease and benefits of the digital realm, there are many reasons to be skeptical. In our 2021 book A Section of Now and its complementary exhibition—both part of a one-year exploration of architecture’s ability, or lack thereof, to evolve in dialogue with society—we studied how digital technology and the demands of late capitalism impact aspects of our lives as varied as labour and leisure. As the spaces we inhabit and our physical selves become increasingly siloed off by the use of digital media, our society heads deeper into the midst of what Lucy McRae, sci-fi artist and body architect, posits is a “crisis of touch.

This reflection prompted a collaboration with gta exhibitions at ETH Zurich to address how technology and new social norms are redefining a fundamental aspect of a city’s existence: the arena of commercial dealings, or the spaces and behaviours that define the selling and buying of goods. If twenty years ago The Harvard Guide to Shopping argued that consumerism had permeated urban public life to the extent of reducing it to shopping, Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, co-directors of gta exhibitions, proposed to revisit this assertion in light of contemporary transformations in retail, and particularly as a result of the development of online commerce—an activity that puts the urban implications of retail at risk. When shopping online, the only thing we touch is the screen or the keyboard of our digital device; we no longer experience the sight of other shoppers, only the sequence of products that algorithms decide we should see.
 
Under the curation of Fischli and Olsen, this collaboration was conceived from the outset as a dialogue between curatorial teams at ETH Zurich and the CCA and between our respective collections, as well as an opportunity to question the format of an architecture exhibition—what we experience in it and how we experience it. A first iteration of the exhibition opened at ETH Zurich in February 2020, using a compelling work by Lynn Hershman Leeson in its communications that shows a mannequin’s hand crashing through a glass display case to point to the animation of objects that gaze back at us through the screen.

In its new iteration at the CCA, Retail Apocalypse unfolds as a story in three chapters that trace historic cycles of retail accumulation (the development of the department store and the shopping mall); decline (vacancies piling up along retail streets); and reinvention (architects and designers seizing their chance to refashion cities). Among the works included in this new iteration of the exhibition are Superstudio’s Design shop in Montecatini (chapter I), Andreas Angelidakis Domesticated Mountain (chapter 2), and Georgie Nettell’s Pre War Abstraction drawings (chapter 3)—representations of information technology first as utopic concept, then as post-architectural manifesto, and finally as post-digital critique.

Retail Apocalypse is complemented by a book published by gta Verlag (also available through our bookstore if you are reading us from North America) and by a series of interviews produced in collaboration with the SSENSE editorial platform and conducted with Jack Self, featuring practitioners from the worlds of architecture, design, fashion, and the arts. With this multiplicity of formats and works, the exhibition suggests that retail spaces can be sites for critical discourse and political action, addressing and challenging notions of labour, gender, class, and value.

Perhaps paradoxically, we are sharing some of these interviews online, beginning this week with the publication of a conversation with Kateřina Frejlachová and Tadeáš Říha on the opaque architecture of logistics infrastructures, which seem to flourish as a result of online shopping, as well as on the life stories they contain. We invite you to join us in this reflection.

Yours,
the CCA

P.S.  Please visit our calendar for information on current and upcoming activities. If you are curious to know more about the work and the discussions that go into their planning, our yearly institutional performance festival takes place next week.


PPS. And if you are in Montréal this weekend and wish to touch and browse books, our bookstore is among the exhibitors at this year’s Volume MTL art book fair.
 

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