DEVOUR! Social cannibalism, political redefinition, and architecture – May 2015

Being a research project, based on preoccupations with social-architectural phenomena, DEVOUR! blended the work of artists with architects, collectives and curators to follow the emergence of architectural or urbanistic hybrid situations, as a consequence of processes of what could be called cultural and social anthropophagy. The project touched upon various contexts in which hybrid structures and practices emerge – legacy of processes of social cannibalism: devoration, imposed absorption of cultural paradigm, unassimilated consumption. Their monstrous, sacrificial, suicidal, but also innovatory outcomes focused on architecture and living practices, dominating the discourse across this project. A hybrid is exposing by its very nature and the interaction of its incongruous sources. It is the outcome of a missed assimilation, an unsuccessful crossbreeding that nevertheless powered a new entity, which carries a strong political relevance and fuels a new configuration.

The exhibition circled around the Brazilian early modernist notion of anthropophagy and its emancipatory potential , which came with the emergence of postcolonial regenerative thinking and triggered a material shape to an utopic architecture that would form a new social identity. The artists delved into historic and present cases in which mutated and distorted structures (buildings, forms, living situations and imaginary environments) are revealed to be late consequence of lingering and often abusive Eurocentric spatialization. Historic and archival material were blended with contemporary artistic work.