Join us Thursday, July 18th as the inaugural WOJR/Civitella Ranieri Architecture Prize recipient Alejandro Haiek presents his completed project, “The Industry of Nature.”
This prize brings a talented architect to Civitella to conceive and construct a site-specific installation on the castle grounds using simple means and locally-available materials.
“The Industry of Nature” takes place in three acts: Tracing Tradition, a social cartographic process; Unfolding Traditions, a series of choreographic landscape interventions; and Twisted Tradition, a performative tectonic installation.
During his Fellowship at Civitella, Alejandro researched the castle environs considering how nature and industry work in tandem to form the traditional Umbrian landscape. His own process of what he calls ‘slow architecture’ often begins with meeting local laborers, builders and fabricators with the aim of making a cartography of talents and resources and resulting then in hybrid practices and processes of abstract thinking. “Tracing Tradition” comes together in the landscape through a matrix of art, design, engineering and local social relations. The project does not materialize as an art object but instead documents a dynamic exchange through narratives and shared resources. Using lines, dots, strips and surfaces, the topography of the site transforms, leaving functional traces and seductive patterns parallel to nature’s own invisible geometries.
Haiek’s process-based artwork questions our understanding of the natural world. What is nature? When and how does nature becomes artifice? When does artifice appear ‘natural’? The project demonstrates how ‘Nature’ can be an artificial construction within a postindustrial landscape, and how procedures, protocols, instruments and tools brought about by industrialization evolve slowly into tradition and cultural knowledge.
Alejandro Haiek is the co-founder of LAB.PRO.FAB, a laboratory that collaborates on community-led initiatives in the barrios of Caracas. His bottom-up approach reactivates underused urban spaces and crosses technical expertise with local intelligence to build productive spaces in low-income areas.
Food and beverages served from 6:00 PM onwards.