Exhibition at Block Architecture Gallery

Stockholm, 2023: Could this happen in nature?

Exhibition statement

Nature doesn’t make mistakes like we do. Nature’s mistakes are nature.

The work in the exhibition “Could this happen in nature” is result of a collaboration between two architects. As such, it is a collage of two positions and two bodies of existing work. It is an ongoing negotiation in which mistakes – or the play of chance – are considered potentials for new readings of known material. A scientist will try to eliminate the risk of failure in her experiments. In the artistic process, one does not necessarily have to take such precautions but can enjoy the mistakes as generators of new forms and insights. The concept of failure is a gift, not a hindrance.

Microscopic, architectural, geological, territorial – the work can be read in various scales simultaneously. It resists the temptation to generalize but takes advantage of using known form – such as an architectural maritime structure, seaweed, and a petri dish – to link the viewer’s observations to reality. The work is an entanglement of thinking and making, an attempt to develop a preform for the complex and unpredictable future that awaits us.

The ecological crisis extends beyond singular problems and is as intricately connected to our cultural, aesthetical realm as it is to the economic and political. While the future needs verifiable results, it also needs methods for handling the arbitrary and inconsistent. We intend to provide ideas and representations of how architecture might manifest itself in a flooded future, with plenty of room for imagination, coincidences, and mistakes. Architecture needs to operate within the world, not at a safe distance from it.

Islands is an ongoing collaboration between Jacob Sebastian Bang and Anne Romme. The exhibition presents examples of artistic research carried out at the Royal Danish Academy