POST_INSTITUTE

In setting up the Post_Institute in Brixton, von Goetz tried to find possibilities in a world of cities where undefined space is an anomaly. The architecture of its edifice is a tapestry of screens and crumbling industry, abject spaces of boom and bust.

 

Frank Lloyd-Wright’s Guggenheim, London’s Tate Modern, Renzo Piano’s Pompidou; these are the atriums, the halls, the hotel lobbies of a globalised art world. Seductive and spectacular, the institution is embrocated with consumption. Art and architecture play on the visual appetite. J.G. Ballard wrote of Michael Manser’s Hilton hotel at Heathrow Terminal 4: ‘one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being.’

 

The Post_Institute was a temporal negotiation, upholding change over inertia. The site acted as a creative Freeport―an island in the midst of a raging sea of regeneration and gentrification. The architecture of labour, of warehouses, stockrooms and trade are phantasmic to the corporate city―glimpsed, heard of, but cast to imagination. It is the architecture of flux.

 

The best ideas remain unrealised, taking the form of blueprints and models, they are suspended in a state of potential. The Post_Institute functioned as a liminal space of means. The structures that house creativity are also the sites of its genesis; any idea, which retains its integrity, is worth preserving. Curatorial practice is not just aesthetic nuance, but a critical necessity. 

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