Stella Brennan

Citizen Band (2004)

4 min 32 secSingle channel / Digital Video / Colour / Sound

As the camera gazes over a radio antenna, curved lines of ceramic pottery, and a rural landscape, a voiceover narrates excerpts from The Mould Manifesto (1958) by artist and architect Freidensreich Hundertwasser. The text begins by celebrating the freedom of painting and sculpture before lamenting architectures “jungle of straight lines” and railing against the work of architects Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and the Bauhaus. The text proposes an architecture in sympathy with the natural world.

“When rust sets in on a razor blade, when a wall starts to get mouldy, when moss grows in a corner of a room, rounding its geometric angles, we should be glad because, together with the microbes and fungi, life is moving into the house and through this process we can more consciously become witnesses of architectural changes from which we have much to learn."

A part of Three Cities (2003–2006), a series of videos by Stella Brennan featuring readings of polemics by famous architects, in which robotic voices narrate flyovers of constructed cityscapes.

Other works in this series

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