The Building, a Scaffold, a Score.Exercises in Unveiling Materialisation:A Few Notes
Johanna BrucknerZurich University of the Arts
The finance-driven deregulation of buildings in Hamburg’s HafenCity, and the subsequent reorganisation of production and labour conditions, based on new technological and infrastructural development, are the main focus of this study. Both, privately financed - and affordable housing, paradoxically, accelerate the amplifying operation of finance through their interaction. Concepts such as the scaffold, which refers both to physical labour on the construction site as well as to the algorithmic scaffold, or framework, as both method and object in algorithmic infrastructure and logistics constitute the tools alongside which new social and cooperative performances of living and working are emerging. Consisting of performative practices, workshops, video installations and a planned publication, this project approaches the politics of the post-Fordist expansionist logic behind construction labour in HafenCity and the accompanying decentralised form and organisation of architectonic and civil space, focusing particularly on current developments in Hamburg.
The research hypothesis for this text, which is structured around a few notes in twelve paragraphs, was originally discussed with the participating performers in temporary social settings on site, on the basis of which they develop dance scores that fed back into these notes. The performers’ responses were articulated in bodily gestures, whose transmissions aim to propose new social infrastructures for the present.
KEYWORDS: scaffold, infrastructure, building, finance, performance, post-Fordism, zone, communities, social class