Nowadays, in every firm, thousands of young architects cut, paste, redraw and assemble libraries of images, entering into fast and ‘perverse’ processes of production, on which they have no control. All these scraps and pieces of drawings are often set aside or abandoned, and become an emblematic catalogue of the current condition, an “archive of horrors”. Potlatch is a collective project.
As in the traditional Native American ceremony, all discarded materials are gathered together in a metaphorical celebration of the ritual, in which remnants of production are donated and consumed, to give them a new meaning. Potlatch is based on gift economy and proceeds without any speculative logic: the result is an infinite virtual landscape of waste, accessible to everyone. Through Potlatch, these sterile fragments are released, and the beauty of the disposition sublimates our condition of immaterial workers with thoughtful detachment. Fosbury Architecture, as recipient will limit itself to assemble a temporary composition. Playing with these scraps the aim is to build up an open source platform carrying out a huge apotropaic drawing, as an opportunity to reaffirm our fragile status. The platform is conceived as a flea market, a collective form, proliferating and permanently under construction. The Potlatch flea market it is not designed, but it is a unified whole composed by multiple individual memorabilia.