Interview with the Oslo Architecture Triennale Curators Cecilie Sachs Olsen and Matthew Dalziel
Text: Alf Jørgen Schnell & Marie S. Hoelseth
+KOTE invited two of the curators of this year’s Oslo Architecture Triennale for a talk about degrowth, the future and the uses of play. For them, wasting time and having fun is part of the solution if we want to achieve a different, just, and sustainable society. But is it enough to play in the face of powerful actors?
Matthew: You know this very pernicious feeling that we all have, that the city is something that is done to us, instead of something that we participate in, that’s what we want to explore in the triennale.
Together with Phineas Harper and Maria Smith, Matthew Dalziel and Cecilie Sachs Olsen are curating this year’s Oslo Architecture Triennale. We met Matthew and Cecilie and asked them about their reflections around the term degrowth and how it can foster change. How did they end up with that term, and not, say, sustainability or sustainable development?
M: How we came to this? I think Maria was doing a course at Shieffeld University some years ago, and a student come upon the term degrowth. Maria had never heard of it, and it went right to her mind bank and stayed there for some years. But then the Triennale came up with the possibility to explore it further. I think both Maria, Phin and I were already quite critical of the practice of architectural exhibitions. What is the architectural exhibition for, and can it ever be as good as visiting a piece of architecture? And also, how is it that architectural biennales and triennales slipped into being part of the consumption culture, rather than being a health check, or being a way of getting together as a community and looking at who we are. I immediately thought that we should have Cecilie to join us to challenge the form of the triennale, because she comes from a theatre background. She has been interested in using arts and performance to open up the possibility-space of the built environment.
“Let’s talk about play as a kind of playful sensitivity”
Cecilie: What I find interesting with the term is that, when you talk about post-capitalism and sustainability, I think degrowth in contrast cuts to the core of the problem, which is this idea of infinite growth on a finite planet. And you know, a very good argument for degrowth is that capitalism can sell anything, but it cannot sell less of it. And I think that is good for degrowth, because all kinds of other terms are so easily recuperated by the capitalist logic. For example, green growth, and also the green economy, which is not about actually reducing our consumption, but rather making us feel better about consuming the right things.
M: We wanted to open the conversation through arts and performance, in order to make people feel welcome, and make people feel engaged. And having a felt experience that allowed them to stay with the trouble. As in, you know, this Donna Harroway book Stay with the trouble? To allow people stay with the trouble, and not escape.
+K: But is degrowth a perspective on society, or is it a strategy for transformation?
C: It’s a classic kind of critique to say that, ‘but you are not presenting any solutions’ or ‘what do we actually need to do?’ I think that is a very, you know, this idea that you immediately have to present solutions is really problematic, because it really limits your imagination. We first have to break free of that kind of thinking before we can start thinking about solutions. So I think when you say strategy, yes it is a strategy to open up our imagination, and to be able to imagine otherwise. Because right now we are so locked in the growth-ideal, that it is almost impossible for us to even think about for example universal income, you know. Because then people would say, ‘oh, but then it will be problem for…’ and what not. And so we are always faced with ‘oh no, because then, because then, because then’.
“Everything that is not contributing to the economy is called wasting time. Like play, it has an infinite value in itself. It creates social interaction and learning, but it is actually looked upon as a waste of time”
M: So there is perhaps no strategy, there is no masterplan, it’s a methodology, which is that we no longer believe in our lord growth.
+K: So you are from the theatre, Cecilie? It makes sense. It seems like theatre and play is a form of strategy of yours, that you kind of connect play and fun to the future, in some sense. Could you say anything about that, how you see play and fun as a kind of way to transform society, or architecture for that matter?
C: Yes, I can talk about that for a long time! Play is central. I think one of the core degrowth ideas, or something that can help you to understand degrowth, is this idea of productivity. As human beings we always produce more energy than what we spend in keeping ourselves alive. Today, in the industrial and capitalist society, all of that excess needs to be spent to contribute to the economy, in a sense. You have to work. Everything you do is about being productive. So, you know, I think one of the best examples is that you sleep, not in order to dream, but to be productive the next day. So everything that is not contributing to the economy is called wasting time. Like play, it has an infinite value in itself. It creates social interaction and learning, but it is actually looked upon as a waste of time. Another important aspect of play is that it can also help us navigate new strategies, for instance breaking the rules. I think we had a good conversation with a friend of us, who is a game designer. And he asked; what if you are an urban planner, and you would look at your fellow citizens as fellow players, how would you act in the city? You would act completely different. You would maybe have more tolerance by playing by different rules. And you would maybe be more curious about what kind of games they were playing. So I think it kind of shifts our perception of the city. And another idea he was talking about is the idea of the cars, and of the car free city, and how we understand cars. What would it mean to look at that from a playful perspective? Let’s talk about play as a kind of playful sensitivity.
M: Our friend was talking about this sort of bizarre thing about what is permitted, in relation to the car city. Which is that, we are all allowed to have this large private object that we can move around the city, and claim as our own space. And what if that space, as a kind of large private object, was opened up for all kinds of other things?
+K: So, what kind of games have you played lately?
M: Let’s pretend place listening! (laughs)
C: Yes, there is certainly no system in place for listening. We are not listening to each other. People speak and speak, but the idea of listening as a way of creating or raising our awareness to our surroundings, is almost non-existent. Being open towards things that are not necessarily immediately at hand, but is out there, is just so important, which is what we propose as a degrowth approach to urban planning. What if we would talk about place listening instead of place making. What would that change?
+K: You talk about place listening, but storytelling also seems important?
C: It is very important for us that the Triennale is practical, and not just an exercise in rhetoric and making perfectly nice arguments that only exist in the arguments itself. So the idea of storytelling is really essential, because you know, if you tell the right story … You know the right, politically wise, they are very good at telling stories. The left need to be better at telling the right stories that actually help people to position themselves in the world, the way that the right can do it. The left is much more academic...
C: An example of storytelling: Yesterday we were reading the IKEA catalogue. Really like consumers. Oh my god, I thought. And then it was funny to see how even like the IKEA catalogue was now telling a story of using less space.
M: The IKEA catalogue is multigenerational, multi racial, compact urban living.
C: It is interesting how all this storytelling manifests. That is what capitalism does. Commerce is one big exercise in storytelling. You know, the planners have realized this idea about future imagining. That was once the artist’s field, right? That was what the artists were really good at. And it is really kind of scary how other planners and developers have become so good at it, about visualizing a certain future, making us believe that is what is coming inevitably. It is just about actors telling stories about imagined futures. It’s kind of about acknowledging that the alternatives is not something far fetch, it’s around us everywhere, and we just need to shift slightly to understand that alternative way we can live in. And I think that relates very much to the future. If you talk about the future as something which is always, you know, if the future is always connected to progress, it becomes quite reductive, rather than seeing that the future is around us everywhere right know. We are bombarded all the time about what the future would look like. About these kind of renderings trying to sell apartments, what do you architects call it, CGIs?
M: Yes, CGIs, the things about the CGIs, computer animations, is this idea about the production of desire, which is really powerful.
“You know, the planners have realized this idea about future imagining. That was once the artist’s field, right? That was what the artists were really good at. And it is really kind of scary how other planners and developers have become so good at it, about visualizing a certain future, making us believe that is what is coming inevitably”
+K: You talk a lot about play and different actors. But do we not need to talk about powerful actors such as developers, and how they are able to tell their stories and make them come true?
M: Do you mean actors in the sense of performers?
+K: Developers could be. You could analyze them as that.
C: They certainly are! (laughs)
+K: It is not sure that they would change their behavior if you told them, “you are an actor”.
M: But I think historically, those powerful actors have been the captivating storytellers
+K: Yes, definitively, but how do you confront them? Is it enough to just point out that, “okay, what you are doing, I see that you earn money in the city and so on, but it is all a game”?
M: You tell a different story, and get your own audience, until they don’t have an audience anymore.
Dette intervjuet ble opprinnelig publisert i +KOTEs 11. utgave, som kom høsten 2019. Utgaven ble til som et samarbeid med Oslo arkitekturtriennale, som har degrowth som tema i år. Triennalen er åpen til og med den 24. november. Papirmagasinet, som i tillegg til dette intervjuet har en rekke tekster som belyser fremtiden og nedvekst, er gratis og finnes på UiO, AHO, NMBU og Fuglen.
Les også Astrid Fadnes’ intervju med Subvertising om å hacke reklame fra det samme fremtids-nummeret.