OUT OF COMPETITION An aficionado of modern architecture, Heinz Emigholz travels through Argentina, Bolivia and Germany – from the slaughterhouses by Salamone in countryside Argentina to the Humboldt Forum in Berlin – to investigate the existence, or absence, of common spaces, underlining the inexorable link between city spaces and buildings with the advance of capitalist ideology.
If throughout his series “Architecture as autobiography” Heinz Emigholz has explored the works of 20th century architects as sediments of world conceptions from which it is possible to read the ideas of Modernity and its way of modelling space, Slaughterhouses of Modernity functions as a sort of epilogue or theoretical appendix while giving also a continuity through two new films: “Salome, Pampa” and “Mamani, en el Alto”.
Unlike the observational predominance of the series, what prevails here is the argumentative logic, close to the documentary essay, where the author exposes his way of understanding the modernity project as a conflict between creative artistic avant-garde and its function at the service of the capitalist ideology, inevitably destructive.
In Slaughterhouses of Modernity we travel from the houses in El Alto for street dogs, to the slaughterhouses built by Salomone in the Argentine pampas, to the Humboldt Forum in Berlin that jumps and moves from one cut to the next to the Bolivian altiplano where it contrasts with the dance halls of the Aymara architect Freddy Mamani. A journey without brakes, full of polemics and black humor, carried by the precision and discursive beauty, both argumental and visual, of Heinz Emigholz. (Vanja Milena)
