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Disrupting Architecture in 3 Speed Trips by Pieterjan Ginckels

In a SPEED TRIP, you and artist Pieterjan Ginckels check the rendered image and its built reality. How and where exactly, beyond being promoted worldwide by their developers, do these dream images end? What is hidden behind the facades, what makes them ‘Leuven’? How do you live in them?
To understand this new landscape, Pieterjan Ginckels provides new tools for new times. One instrument is SPEED TRIP, a performance that he has already rolled out from Los Angeles to Beijing. As a SPEED TRIPPER, you embrace the superficiality you’re investigating, and you take selfies rather than samples. Field research becomes safari. Will you join and become a render character turned to life?

During the exhibition, Pieterjan Ginckels organizes three SPEED TRIPS together with the local skating community, the Swiss architects Svizzera Intl. and the student collective Paradigm Weekly. The base camp for these activities is the NO PEAKS sculpture at the Barbarahof: a black truck trailer painted with the words “NO PEAKS”, wedging itself between the perfectly realised renderings of the urban developers and the daily routines of their clients. The trailer appears to be a stately monolith, but opens itself as a field station, recording and broadcasting studio, and discussion space.

During each SPEED TRIP, participants gather in the NO PEAKS sculpture for a brief introduction by the artist. Pieterjan Ginckels appoints experts who will guide you through the city on a unique NO PEAKS safari. We complete the SPEED TRIP back at the sculpture, where we translate the aftershock of our experiences into new markings on the sculpture’s dusty surface.

Guide: skateboard community.
Filter: (post/anti)skateability of a perfect project.
The world’s most famous skateboard magazine, Thrasher, invented and institutionalised the “SKATE & DESTROY” slogan. Kids tattoo it on their bodies, its logo typeface is widely used, fashionistas wear its long-sleeve t-shirt versions.
Skate & Destroy is directly linked to street skating, wich further popularized in famous skateboarding videos, in which street skating scenes often resulted in – filmed – cop chases. The street skater is expertly equipped to pierce through the serene image of a neighbourhood, set off its social alarms, and explore the way its policies materialise in the shape of slabs, rails and benches. The devil’s in the details, too: anti-skating contraptions, roughened surfaces or simply added fences and spikes are the retaliation of project managers – their sole creative response, perhaps?
Can we, in Leuven’s blooming new areas, still find streets, let alone street skating? To answer this question, our guides-on-wheels will take you to their hotspots in, beneath, behind and beyond recently developed projects in Leuven.

Register here.

Guide: Svizzera Intl. + Pieterjan Ginckels.
Filter: SoDoSoPa Worldwide
In the South Park episode “The City Part of Town” the residents and mayor attempt to repair the town’s tarnished image by building “Historic SoDoSoPa” on and around Kenny’s dilapidated house. This episode led many to speculate that this was a parody of a new urban development located in their own city: Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Portland, Austin, Boise, Louisville, Cincinnati, Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia, Norfolk, etc. The modernist’s dream of a “unified project” uniting urbanism & architecture & interior seems to be no sweat at all for the contemporary property developer. But are SoDoSoPa’s confined only to the Americas and all the fat, dumb Americans?

Members of Svizzera International, a shell company based in Switzerland, will visit Leuven on May 16 on a quest to uncover instances of the worldwide SoDoSoPa and assess its conformity to global standards. What and where are the legible traits of the single world city? How does Leuven stack up against the global image? How continuous is this image—does it have a backside or are there any ‘blindspots’?
Following a brief introductory talk, SI will hand out business cards while being led through the city-est parts of Leuven by Pieterjan Ginckels and an expert team of wannabe developers and real estate agents.

Svizzera International is a Zürich-based architectural practice run by Alessandro Bosshard (CH), Li Tavor (CH) and Matthew van der Ploeg (US). Together with Ani Vihervaara (FI), their project Svizzera 240: House Tour was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2018 Architecture Biennale in Venice. They currently teach at ETH Zürich.

Register here.

Guide: Paradigm Weekly Collective.
Filter: precarity of the realized rendering.
We are flooded on screens and banners with rendered images of our interiors, apartments and hoods, and they shine so brightly that their realized versions always disappoint. We excel in consuming the rendered reality in such a way that the places in which we live seem only remnants of a lesser reality. When we collide with the limits of this delusion, face to face with brick and concrete, we ask the question: is the realized render more real than its unrealized counterpart? Have we rendered or are we being rendered? ”- Paradigm Weekly Collective invites you to enter the render.

Register here.

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