MAJORIAN 458

GLASS PERISTYLE
2008
Digital print on kapafix, blog, Web page, MySpace, Facebook

The objective of the Glass Peristyle project is the interpolation of a tumour into the living tissue of the city. The spatial idea is obvious. The contemporary mixed-use structure squats in the empty volume of the Peristyle. The historical square as stratified site of encounters disappears, and the square’s theme is transformed into uniform designer hospitality features on three floors. In the external design of the elevation with its blue reflective panes of glass and fashionable contents, the building represents a terrorist attack on public space, on the monumental heritage and the historical urban ambience.
The structure inserted differs in no way in its design, internal spatial concept and contents from the majority of such mixed use buildings that are springing up all over this fair land. Unified catalogue architecture, speciously contemporary, clad in glass and stainless steel, filled with life-style contents and elite housing, is a place with no identity, and placed in such a context totally wipes out the complexity, the historical relations, tradition, memory, the humanity and the dimension of the public, exchanging all that for what we are in the habit of calling contemporary requirements. This project, with the strength of its nonsensicality, wishes to erase the said values from the collective consciousness.
This project is not a study, rather an anti-study of a case, which has a revolutionary spirit incorporated into its essence. Revolutions repose on fundamental human emotions. The intellectual component of a revolution is the initial impulse, the later superstructure. The project hence in its very concept puts historical references and expert remarks into the background, directly attacking identity, aiming at the basic emotional makeup of each individual and the personal memories, viewpoints, rituals and feeling of belonging.
Apart from the emotional orientation of the project, the wish is to achieve via it an intellectual connection with art interventions to date in this space that, each in their own time, have had a powerful and pithy activist note. Seventy years after Grgur of Nin was put in the same place, forty years after Red Peristyle and 10 years after Black Peristyle, in 2008 the Glass Peristyle, in the media, and in a manner fitting for the time, also raises its voice for liberation - not this time from the foreign occupier or the repression of governmental authority, but from out-of-control suborning capital in the hands of individuals who are irreversibly eroding the space itself and the right to its public and free use, with all the pertaining strata and dimensions. Freedom of use of public space is immanent to every individual.

MAJORIAN was a Roman emperor in whose time the imminent fall of the Western Empire hotted up. In 458 he passed an edict in which he drew attention to the severe condition of the city spaces and the Roman monuments brought about by demolition and thoughtless construction by private investors in conjunction with the support of suborned city officials. Such crimes, according to the Majorian edict, were penalised with large fines and amputations of hands.In 2008 the focus of Majorian’s interest is in the manipulations of information, the infiltration of the media system via the global communication channels and the dissemination of elaborately worked out simulations of reality. The material that it deals with is the same - the endangered public space. The Glass Peristyle is a manifesto of a work in which the artist starts of a cycle of spatial and media interventions, because of which she or he has resolved to keep his or her real identity secret.