daniele jost

selected ambient works vrs.8.1

in the age of dust




ARCHITECTURE AS A NECESSARY DESTINY
Gianluca Marziani

Ethically responsable landscapes… buildings equally responsables… sites and structures whose ethical consciousness mirrors their esthetical condition (and viceversa). Symptomatic appearences traced without comfortable compromises, throughout a stylistic leap into human pathological disfunctions, a flight over cumbrous memories and socially allarming messages. Environments and constructions where responsibility becomes synonymous of moral consciousness in terms of artistic project. Sites of memory, relating to handed down sites, mediatic realities and individual living experience; Recognizable places intented as universal archetypes. Thus, appearances which character is definitetly not reassuring but rather anomalous in terms of both the artificial evidence and the blatant contrast that define the surroundings. The architectural volumes are clearly out of scale and present eccessive monochromies, revealing a sort of epidermal and imaginary re-definition (although plausibile if we think about “Schindler’s List” or about some grafic works signed by The Designers Republic for Warp). Their presence within such landscapes recall permanently floating Moloch, striking and invasive, definitive elements aimed at “inventing” realistic futures towards a comatose present.

The work as inner destiny.
Procedure: emotional environment of doubt in facing the world.
The works: cathartic synthesis of collective madness leading to degradation, crime, and decadence.

A thought upon contemporary civilization rendered throughout images and architectural forms, pivotal terms to construct a novel imaginary towards a consequent civic reality, inhabitable and narratively palpable. The image determines here the accomplished form of the artist’s thinking; a visualization of a creative path, the primary and tangibile identity represented as an icon. Architectural volumes address, in such circumstance, a frontal objective of such images, in other words, their obstinate desire to penetrate sites is marked by a strong moral connotation. We are not standing in front of buildings we would like to inhabit, for their surfaces all result permeated with something disturbing. Nevertheless, they structurally represent a symbolic doubt around the suffering of our planet. They become significant objects meant to inform us on civil lessons. In fact, they bear both an expressed negativeness (their structure being a link heading to real freedom) and a non-expressed positiveness (their radicalism as an evidence to be overturned). The impacting acidity of some of colors (particularly the red) inevitably signals alchemic papers, mysterious forms: the silent magic of objects holding special powers.

Daniele Jost empathically binds image and architectural form. The distinction between real and fantastic becomes ethereal. The artist manipulates photography using electronics, skillfully confounding real and virtual features.All coincides within a sole gaze that exceeds geographic boundaries: suburbian decadence, intense landscapes, industrial and agricultural archeology… Such linguistic choice conveys photography, sculpture, audio-visual, digital drawing and installation models, all aimed at creating a visual machine exempted from any preconceived boundary.


FIRST PLATFORM: Architectural Moloch

Autumnal landscapes of dried leaves floors, unlimited forests covered with snow, urban landscapes of cement, cultivated fields, unhabitated streets filled with rows of town houses, a cave, the old and obsolete paper machine…those are among the sites where the author searched for peculiar aspects, historical and geographical features, traces and anomalies of a world that demands radical responses concerning the artistic vision. Abrupt as Moloch between offsite and mystery, some architectural models distinguish themselves within spaces as they were fresh blood spots on the snow. Claustrophobic volumes in a close perimeter, result and reversal of what Buckminster Fuller had theorized as geodetic doms. One after the other, Jost’s livable structures turn around the concept of universal domus. Proving how basic forms are permanently bounded to their original function: thus, and again, ethically responsabile buildings staging both their status and the genesis of their own construction. Houses as the result of urban blight: true surviving reaction and conformation to a decadent version of the world. Sites of necessity.
Spots representing a shelter, a way to escape, a site for meditation, isolation, solitude and rebirth.




Crisis unit
Living form epitomizing the minimum stage of what individuals can humanly sustain.
The house as focus for collective discomfort, compulsory shelter for a general emergency situation. Nothing but the site of functional reduction deprived from Le Corbusier idealistic utopia. Even if it strongly reminds Aldo Rossi’s postmodern bell tower, we are inevitably brought back to pinnacle towers, war allarms and outside tensions, all amplified by the contrast of a landscape covered with snow…


Multifunction in-stable
Powerful site reminding constriction, a mandatory bound; the pathology within the walls. The prison, the hospital, the secret laboratory: something dark and disturbing, an architecture made of sharp blocks that reflects an insane ideology, an undeclared dictatorship, laws that constrict and compress…




Generational Manipulations
Retaining walls erected in Chernobyl to circumscribe radiations. The architectural element, essential and firm confirms the negative vitality of walls built according to political intents. Berlin represents a clamorous case although we remember numerous other examples of injurious curtains. The situation within the works properly underlines the contrast with such landscape, a place featured by pastoral nature and raw material integrity. A disturbing scene that stimulates our imaginary towards both the consequences of nuclear disasters and apparently invisibile situations. Eventually, Nature always presents the check for our wrong choices, ultimately requesting from us, humans, the final account…


Itinerant forms (at the present residual)
The classical containers we see in harbours or on trade ships. Now we can find them in an open-air cave, unprobable context for transportation… The containers meant to move products seem now anchored to an archaic ground, nearly as lanscape art interventions (but remember that Jost’s works on the electronic virtuality of the scenes) pointed at stimulating a dialectic between beauty and madness.




Random Autosystem
A pile-dwelling realized with free creative elaboration. A place characterized by a difficult habitability, primitive and absurdly abstract, located on an other site of pure agricultural prosperity. It is everyday life that shapes its features in relation to contemporary world. It’s an individual gesture that moulds the world according to its own image.


Christ garden
An architecture elaborated by a Swiss hermit through the recycling of what found on the ground in question. A site that reflects the utopic vision of the owner, his meditative consciousness, the anomalous way of comunicating with real things. An example of possibile freedom within a landscape that hides energy and evolution potentiality. Inevitably we think about a Paolo Soleri and his Arcosanti, his naturally shaped American town without cars nor auto-referencial consumerism. A place where utopia has been transformed in buildings, streets, energetic systems, products, relational elements and real life…




Die neue ziviliesierung
A Residential three-storied house in Dresda after the well-known bombing. A sorrowfully famous symbol known as one of the greatest tragedies of the past century.
We see it in front of some constructions with very little ethic and lavish display of cheap architecture bestiality. “Nothing new”, will be the comment of many. Nothing excusable, we add today in finding again a curse behind another curse. Lessons always occur by rising from the ruins of the past. Some lessons, unfortunately, arouse from periodical layers of ruins, as a single spell was not enough to make us feel the ultimate heartbeat of degradation…


The factory of silence
Two buildings in Hong Kong, the first situated in the financial heart of the city, the second in the periphery. They look at each other as enemies before a duel. We see them, monolithics and absolutes, inside an abandoned train factory. It recalls a scene of Takeshi Kitano where the buildings play the role of the Yakuza characters. The buildings present identical forms but opposite functions: the former, capitalistic, and mere familiar surviving, the second. They represent the strongest conflict of a growing metropolitan delirium, exasperated in a China that is recently experiencing an economic boom. Careful to this work: it points at future directions, the emptiness in which we are constructing, forgetting any respect for human relationships, the contestual quality, the beauty of an inner flight…




Contemporary utopic theather
An ideal home. The one that a child would drawn on a blank sheet. The mental site of instinctive visions. Maybe the place for rebirth. Anyways the space where Jost placet, in front of Corviale, the long Roman palace where all social utopia rapidly turn into suburbian decline


kc1
A cement house maquette. A message about the multiplication of ideas, about how we seek for approval without conscience, on the disadvantages that technology entails when it gets distracted from ethics. The concrete little house as a replica of a true wooden house. Never the less, the two homes seem distant, they do not comunicate in the right way. Probably such work is the most accessibile for interpretation and recontextualization. A piece where everything is transformed in moral doubt…



SECOND PLATFORM: installation

Baghdad, Scampia, Berlin, Bologna, Capaci, Chernobyl, New York, London, Madrid, Hiroshima, Sarajevo, Vajont… there are others , some cities return several times, others have become famous for the delirium that involved them … let’s say you understood what we are talking about. Sites of wasted tragedies, real spaces containing archetypes of extreme violence, a concentration of blind terror and ugliness we do not want to mention. The dust report us their stories through a hanging and essential installation, a silent diapason around the world’s noises, a light army of small plastic bags that observes the attendants and awakes the still absent gazes.

daniele jost era della polvere spirale
chernobil 1986
kabul 2001
agadir 1960
alessandria 1303
alessandria 1323
alessandria 391 dc
ancash 1970
assisi 1997
avezzano 1915
beirut 1983
Ayodhya 1992
bagdad 1991
bagdad 2003
bali 2002
Bam 2003
bangladesh 1991
banqiao 1975
beirut 1975
calabria 1783
berlino 1945
berlino 1989
Bhopal 1984
boston 1919
bruxelles 1867
ercolano 79 dc
cnosso 1628 ac
capaci 1992
cartagine 149-146 ac
Chicago 1871
citta del messico 1985
geertruidenberg 1421
guernica 1937
hiroshima 1945
Coventry 1940
Dallas 1936
damasco 1400
damour 1976
Dordrecht 1421
dresda 1945
firenze 1864
firenze 1963
Friuli 1976
Irpinia 1980
Sannio 1456
Matese 1456
johnstown 1889
i’zmit 1999
Jaslovské Bohunice 1977
hyogo 1995
kabul 2001
kashmir 2005
kobe 1995
lisbona 1755
londra 1941-45
Londra 1666
messina 1908
middletown 1979
mumbai 1993
new york 2001
naghasaki 1945
parigi 1853
Oakland 1991
oklahoma 1995
pompei 79 dc
leningrado 1943
napoli 1943
napoli 1980
seul 1995
seveso 1976
heffield 1864
spitak 1988
st francis 1928
st Louis 1896
st Louis 1972
stabiae 79 dc
Tokaimura 1999
tokio 1923
tomsk 1993
Tuscania 1971
Volture 1930
torino 1943
ugarit 1200 ac
vajont 1963
Valle di scalve 1923
Valtellina 1987
verona 1117
vienna 1859
vienna 1683
bhuj 2001
roma 64 dc
roma 410 dc
roma 1527
roma 1945
baghdad 1985
tehran 1985
mosca 1812
mosca 1944
stalingrado 1942
honk kong 1987
milano 1980
milano 1943
praga 1968
Stava 1985
gaza 2003
hebron 2003
betlemme 2003
malamocco 1117
Kalkiliya 1967
ramallah 2003
qualqylia 2003
nablus 2003
minsk 1944
mijdal gad 1950
milano 1969
selinunte 409 ac
selinunte 205 ac
Ribolla 1954
kidalikilagi 1984
jenin 2003
sarajevo 1992
Siruzkoh 1222
rodi 226 ac
sumatra 2004
Tangshan 1976
texas city 1947
San francisco 1906
scampia 1997

THIRD PLATFORM: digital drawings

Then, on the edge of the exhibition itinerary, all resumes into the essence of drawing, the light line on immaculate sheets. Here the hand moving as footprints on the snow. The act of drawing recreates mental structures, sensibile inventions reifyable over their own genetical utopia. Let’s think about it: any architectural work is a utopia that becomes form, a mind platform that increases on our planet living ground.





Architecture as necessary destiny

Project and destiny



Let’s conclude our extra-urban journey within the abandoned space of an old paper machine. On the floor, only paper, abundant rolls as a metaphore for human topography. The destiny that is outlined on a blank sheet, the departing element from which Jost embraces the journey after the catharsis operated during each previous stops. Starting again from cellulose, from the perimeter of the ideal house, from the black that marks the foundations on the white paper. Beginning once again from the dust, through the dust, inside the dust that yet hold us and belong to us.

A grain, a person, a story, again a future…