CNCRT, Via Martiri d'Otranto, 65 (2026)

16/01/2024

A life question: our productive process
5. Institutions of labor

For the book of , together with many other contemporary collectives, we were called to produce 5 images with text on the way we live, work and practice architecture.

A short extract from our contribution for the book Collective Processes. Counterpractices in European Architecture, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2021.

What if we build monuments?! In architecture history, temples, churches, cathedrals, classicism, columns, neo-classical formalism, rhetoric totalitarianism, late-Rossism, statues, obelisks, Krier’s Atlantis deliriousness, and so forth, through their language and order of powerful imposingness, were used as devices for the representation of the instituions of totalitarianisms and nation-state capitalisms. Emerging from the genericness of the city, these architectural forms had to institutionalize specific functions of the State: religion, universities, schools, administration, economy, government, Palace of Soviets, banks, Wall Street, army, kingdom, but never labor or pure togetherness. Taking into account this dialectical relation of architecture and representation (of a ritual/function), what if we institutionalize what we do, our labor and our rituals of being together?

CNCRT .aletta .is.a.woman .melchiorre Antonio Paolillo and Giovanna Pittalis

08/01/2024

A life question: our productive process 4. Struggle for pleasure
 For the book of , together with many other contemporary collectives, we were called to produce 5 images with text on the way we live, work and practice architecture.

A short extract from our contribution for the book Collective Processes. Counterpractices in European Architecture, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2021.

If work absorbs pure life and vice versa, when will we have to enjoy some moments of pleasure and otium? When will we finally have to do nothing? Once upon a time, bars, restaurants, cinemas, piazzas, terraces were meant for fun, for pleasure and smileys, today they advertise multitasking and long-stay working. This tautology becomes so banal and horribly cannibal as we think to the shame of an unemployed boy, girl or the discomfort of some young lovers having a drink in a bar full of laptop users. For those of us still emerged in academic life in bars you find crowds of students, freelancers, and new potential collectives. For many of us office workers, after working hours otium is still possible (some call it happy hour); others take public transport and go straight home. Struggling for pleasure means transforming work and the productive process from mere task-obligation to a higher level, closer to art and joyful as creative poetry.

CNCRT .aletta .is.a.woman .melchiorre Antonio Paolillo and Giovanna Pittalis
 

23/11/2023

A life question: our productive process
3. Cooperation is …

For the book of , together with many other contemporary collectives, we were called to produce 5 images with text on the way we live, work and practice architecture.

A short extract from our contribution for the book Collective Processes. Counterpractices in European Architecture, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2021.

Cooperation is what structures our productive process. Cooperation is all of us working together, sometimes mixing-up, sometimes just 3, sometimes 2, sometimes 1 that wishes 10 or 100.000. (Some of us have never met, while others can always still join, externals, collectives, friends.) Cooperation is also what Capital needs to reproduce itself. Cooperation is the employer orchestrating a team of auto-CADists in his Trump-like office. Everything but an orchestra. Cooperation is Competition. Cooperation starts in the Office. Cooperation is a huge generic room of depressed and anxious precarious people, sometimes in silence, sometimes laughing, sometimes dining together, still for the necessity of the office. Outside the office, Cooperation is all of us wanting to give a name to what we want to do but still contradict each other. Contradiction is Cooperation. Sometimes Cooperation confuses with Union, but Union is not office-Cooperation A new form of Cooperation is what we experiment with. An alternative to the office-Cooperation-labor, no Bosses. Our Cooperation is still invisible. Cooperation is what makes this possible.

CNCRT .aletta .is.a.woman .melchiorre Antonio Paolillo and Giovanna Pittalis

21/11/2023

A life question: our productive process
2. Unionize everywhere

For the book of , together with many other contemporary collectives, we were called to produce 5 images with text on the way we live, work and practice architecture.

A short extract from our contribution for the book Collective Processes. Counterpractices in European Architecture, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2021.

Working together (for us) is possible only virtually—Join the Meeting! Union still seems a utopia today, it is not a syndicate of architects, but it nevertheless happens everywhere. There is not a specific place (it doesn’t exist). At home, in different cities, at the office, while taking a train, a bus, while running or walking in a park, while saying hi to a friend, while taking a plane, every moment becomes horribly possible for working and Skyping, WhatsApp-ing and Slacking with one another. After all, without us and others like us working, the city, offices, schools, universities and airports would have no sense. Right here life itself becomes a productive process. It is enough to have a laptop and an internet connection to join others elsewhere. Is this coercion, fun, masochism or self-responsibility?! Perhaps, yet. Everywhere we move, travel and change life, others like us are still there, doing the same thing and sharing the same story. Workers of the world… (need to) do something.

CNCRT .aletta .is.a.woman .melchiorre Antonio Paolillo and Giovanna Pittalis

17/11/2023

A life question: our productive process
1. Diary of common lives

For the book of , together with many other contemporary collectives, we were called to produce 5 images with text on the way we live, work and practice architecture.

A short extract from our contribution for the book Collective Processes. Counterpractices in European Architecture, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2021.

The diary is the first form of intellectual production in our lives. A diary collects daily events, affective memories, words, sketches, tears and smileys poetically given form in a book of white sheets. It accumulates wishes, knowledge and imagination. Writers or not, poets or not, talented interpreters of plays or not, having to write a diary or not, everyone does collect all those thoughts somewhere. Once within labor market, as adult-students and workers, what we discover is a multitude of common diaries: us. Same books, same authors, same architects, same teachers, same stories of lives, same city, but born in different ones, different references, different individualities, individual visions, same material problematics, same employers, same mentors, same places in life, such as libraries and universities where all this process took place. What we do is putting in common these knowledges, experiences and wishes.

CNCRT .aletta .is.a.woman .melchiorre Antonio Paolillo and Giovanna Pittalis

11/11/2023

You don’t have to live like a Referee. Refuge in the Collective.

We took part in the conference series The Great Strength of the Collective! organized by The University of Bamberg (https://leibniz-irs.de/en/aktuelles/veranstaltungen/09/the-great-strength-of-the-collective). We questioned the historical formation of the architectural office and proposed a critique of the mechanism of extraction of the intellectual, relational, and physical value that characterize this form of enterprise. For us, only the Collective could represent a possible alternative of organization – especially outside the office space – spread throughout the city and able to transform labor into a form of pleasure.

CNCRT .aletta

, , ,

10/10/2023

INVISIBLE LIVES Working together everywhere

Within the contemporary landscape of poor work opportunities, architects, students, and researchers – the most fragile workers that are dealing with freelance, precarious, part-time jobs – are starting to cooperate and organize themselves into new mutualistic associations. In recent times, we witness an increase in the number of collectives, student platforms, working groups that are challenging traditional architectural offices whose goal was to capture and subsumed the creative labour by organizing it in structures of waged work. Only by recognizing this new working condition and by placing ourselves in a critical position towards this totalizing working condition, we could face this last phase of cognitive exploitation. That is because only when the whole life is put at work that the common can establish itself as a real alternative.

CNCRT Antonio Paolillo .melchiorre Giovanna Pittalis .torsello .aletta .is.a.woman

Photography Jeff Wall

08/02/2020

Sono "Spazi lunari" quelli immaginati da otto collettivi creativi emergenti per gli spazi dell'istituto salesiano Redentore, nel quartiere

01/02/2020

-work in progress-

Today, CNCRT at ri-RED/Bari with Domes (aule)

03/06/2019

CNCRT presented its collective work during the talk '5+5x5' within the event OPEN!

CNCRT

16/01/2024

08/01/2024

23/11/2023

21/11/2023

17/11/2023

11/11/2023

10/10/2023

08/02/2020

01/02/2020

03/06/2019

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share