Operating as an invisible infrastructure, real estate language can be seen as an alternative construction site where projects are built by means of narrative, storytelling, and fiction. This language acts as a performative device to define imaginaries of both profit and growth and to normalize and even legitimate otherwise problematic construction developments. The current (built) environment is produced under the condition of a prevalent ‘real-estate-media complex’ in which the property industry deploys media technology to produce and promote commodified real estate.
This workshop, titled Real Estate Poetry, was held by architect, researcher, and curator Marija Marić and worked to critically dissect the language of property developers by asking whether promotional copy can be considered as a new and unexpected source of fiction and poetry. Real Estate Poetry is an outline for a literary genre, one that is solely based on real estate advertisements. Ads, seen as ephemeral texts soon to be obsolete after the real estate property is sold, are collected and transcribed, displaced as ready-mades, and reread as works of literary fiction and poetry.
By rereading advertisements for different local and international property developments, and thus, occupying the position never intended by the writers of these texts, we opened up a set of new questions: what is the relationship between buildings and their real estate fictions, housing and screens, ground-plans and ungrounded words, architecture and its media, and how are architects and urban planners to mediate these materialities critically?
ORGANIZER
Marija Marić, PhD, Architect, Curator, and Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Luxembourg
HOST
Ana Miljački, PhD, Professor of Architecture, and Director of Critical Broadcasting Lab, MIT
PARTICIPANTS
Celia Quynh-Mai Chaussabel, Mara Diavolova, Lauren Gideonse, Mara Jovanović, Orr Kalati, Sheau Lim, and Jordan Walters