Burning Seville – an architectural meditation (Super8 film installation)
Buildings on fire: Towards a new approach to urban memory, Cities Methodologies 2014, The UCL Slade School of Fine Arts

Artist: Stamatis Zografos

Exhibition curation: Stamatis Zografos & Elena Papadaki

Date: 28 Aril 14 – 02 May 14

This Super8 film is generated by architecture students of Seville University and reflects their desire to ‘destroy’ their city. The students were asked to ‘eliminate’ buildings from Calle Betis in Triana, a street of great historical significance and heritage value. The film comprises the sequential recording of the façades of the buildings on Calle Betis where each chosen ‘building to be destroyed’ has been edited out.

Based on theories of psychoanalysis, my intention is to give voice to this community’s death drive, which otherwise, if not sublimated, can become masochistic and self-destructive. This sublimation, which is inspired by Lacan’s and Pasolini’s views on editing, is a conceptual artistic praxis and takes place through an in-camera editing technique that relies on sunlight’s destructive capacity to burn the film’s emulsion.

This installation is a sequence project of the Super8 film and sound installation entitled ‘Stage 3 – The Retrieval of the Archive: Witnessing the Destruction of Seville’, which was showcased at the 3^rd Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Close Closer, in September 2013.