New Interfaces 02/ Zuzana Duchová/ Conversations about the problems of public spaces

MEDIUM Gallery, Hviezdoslavovo námestie 18, Bratislava

Architecture and building culture is an image of the state of our society. With its complex characteristics, it determines the quality of life to a great extent. They not only impact the present of our cities, but also become a historical trace telling about our present in the future. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.

The aim of the BRUTUS Architecture Award is to showcase architecture and its authors and co-creators whose resulting work demonstrates a combination of antithesis and lack of vision, thus contributing to social or ecological decline (negating the status of the international Pritzker Architecture Prize). BRUTUS follows the achievements in the field of public buildings, especially investments from public funds.

BRUTUS monitors the processes of construction activity and urban development in public administration and local government. It tracks public spaces and the state of thinking about public space. It follows the reconstruction, renovation and adaptation of buildings, especially in the field of heritage construction, in the face of today's challenges such as the fragmentation of power and climate change. BRUTUS is interested in the landscape, its urbanism and infrastructure, and large-scale projects. However, BRUTUS primarily observes problematic social contexts affecting public space, housing and the development of the urban environment.

It wants to name the below-average-standard in Slovak architecture and urban development in the conceptual, social, cultural and technical sense. The purpose of constructive criticism is not to be criticism per se, but a humorously light search for solutions. BRUTUS is therefore not reduced to passing judgment on individual dilemmas of aesthetics, but seeks lessons from the crisis.

Zuzana Duchová is a curator and journalist, she studied art history at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Bratislava and the University of Vienna, and defended her dissertation on cultural cities at the STU in Bratislava. In addition to her theoretical research on cultural life in cities, she has co-organized several events on the intersection of art, architecture, and creative tourism, and together with more than forty co-authors, she has published two books on Bratislava: BA! U-fu-tourist guide and BA!! places of living culture (1989 - 2016). She works for Creative Europe Desk Slovakia, where she deals with project management of cultural projects and grants. Curator and creative force of the project Salónik, editor of the magazine Arch.

The interdisciplinary lecture series New Interfaces 02 in the dramaturgy of the head of the MEDIUM Gallery, Miroslava Urbanová, focuses on topics affecting our conditions of cognition in the interfaces of constantly updating technologies and in contrast to the desire for an authentic, visceral experience of the escaping here and now. It focuses primarily on the investigation and reflection of different types of spaces, their meanings, transformations, cohabitation within spaces: public space, digital spaces, topoi, spaces that remain seemingly untouched by people, or are totally and irreversibly transformed. The aim of the lectures is to provide a comprehensible approach to aspects of our lived online present in circles that reflect the posthumanist discourse, transformations in the perception of time and temporality, new artistic interfaces such as game art. At the same time, the lectures reflect the themes that appear in the dramaturgy of the exhibition plan of the gallery (and the reading club for VŠVU students What's the Point?), which carries a certain line of tension between the subject reacting to the new interfaces of technological progress, its effects on our perception of living and virtual reality and escape to the corporeality of experience.

Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.