international exhibition. The Lingotto factory that Mattè Trucco built for Fiat in Turin in the early 1920s and which Manfred Pernice arouses as a mental backdrop for one of his architectural sculptures, scrutinises the presence and techniques of forms, surfaces and materials from everyday popular imagery in large plannings and designed environments. Oscar Tuazon looks to vernacular builders and non-architects for creating hybrid structures that use other engineering methods as their rationale. Tobias Puthrih is evenly fascinated by alternative construction methods and the shapes they can generate. Here he looks at the design possibilities for bent plywood sheets and applies that to furniture typologies which Adrian Blomme had designed in his time. Questioning the meaning of design also provides the subject matter for the film made by Armando Andrade Tudela at the Synanon Foundation, set up in 1958 in Santa Monica, California by Charles E. Dederich; his intention was to build a community based on self-help and a vision of life as a constant rehabilitation exercise. By the mid-1990s, Synanon had disappeared without trace, aside from a few social activities that included secondhand furniture stores. Tudela films one such store where furniture and other artefacts have ended up, giving rise to an accumulation of forms. These forms - designed by man - are an integral part of the history of ‘design’ - the history of the adaptation of form in order to create styles, worlds. The multiple references to historic spaces
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and their programmes is self-evident in the artificiality and décor-like way Alexandra Leykauf applies it in her illusionistic and spatial kaleidoscopes of photo-montages and murals. I wish to thank Christophe Van Gerrewey for having accepted our invitation and for having responded with this selection of seminal texts on the topics of architectural discussion over the last decades. Also, for having pointed-out and included a text that attempts to define and thematise the consequence of the omnipresence of referencing in contemporary art. Not unlike the automatism linked with making everything into a new ‘label’, the art magazine that published the text will be acknowledged for turning a method into a new style ‘ism’ - referentialism and creating the widespread phenomenon of referencing, which this exhibition project subjects to speculation by using it as a prism to analyse and formulate certain hypothetical theses and contradictions in the practice of contemporary visual art. Emilie Dotheij and Kwinten Lavigne are herewith thanked for assisting and constructing all the elements that form the exhibition, and Elena Filipovic for offering continual feedback and dialogue on the selection of artists and on the hypothetical ideas that underpin this endeavour. Dirk Snauwaert