By Basil
Pornography is not shocking, or even provocative anymore. PornHub, the world’s most (in)famous online pornography platform, with bold and ironic advertisement campaigns as much as a distinct drum beat, has entered the sphere of global pop culture. A lot comes to my mind when thinking of ‚City‘ and ‚Porn‘. Sure, tall buildings look like penises. Haha. Zaha Hadid’s stadium in Qatar does kinda look like a vulva. Most pornography that I am familiar with though, does not specify locations.
The city is a rather unimportant detail in the background, except maybe when shot in Paris. I remember the first time I watched the mind-boggling music video for their song Baby Baby Baby by French duo Make the Girl Dance, which features a sunny Parisian afternoon and three naked young women. Needless to say, this video, depicting public nudity has become significantly more popular than their music. In their career, it is the one thing standing out. Even though, the public showing of certain body parts, such as the genital area, buttocks or breasts in many places around the world is no longer considered indecent exposure, the most common social media channels do prohibit such images.
Guy Debord describes in The Society of the Spectacle a social relation among people, mediated by images. A notion I learned to accept and relate to, in the past pandemic year during which my screentime exploded, attending lectures via Zoom or Youtube as well as scrolling carelessly up and down through memes on my Instagram feed. Despite the claim to understand architecture as a language, both architecture and porn are primarily communicated via images. Captivated onto a picture, the subject becomes an object of lust. Beautiful pictures on popular pornographic websites like ArchDaily, Dezeen or A f a s i a, as Walter Benjamin predicted, lose their aura in the age of copy-paste.
Architecture and pornography alike, if anything, what strikes me as obscenity is not what the image depicts but what my mind assumes it represents.
To me personally, it was my interest in photography that conducted me towards architecture. Working for renowned architecture photographer Roland Halbe, editing pictures of astonishing houses on the Pacific coast of Chile, I even gained an insight into the production of #archiporn. Architecture and pornography alike, if anything, what strikes me as obscenity is not what the image depicts but what my mind assumes it represents. Namely, a world in which men mostly, surrounded by real estate on private property and women, reduced to a fuckable object, keep on stiffening a global narrative. Considering the urgency of the current state of planet earth and its ruling species it goes without saying; today, for architecture and urbanism, concerns about how to make nice objects should no longer be a top priority. A change of perspective is necessary.
Barcelona based Swedish filmmaker Erika Lust is probably the most influential contemporary pornographer. At least to my limited knowledge on the topic. Her 2004 debut short The Good Girl turns the longstanding, misogynist porno plot of the pizza guy around and takes the female point of view. Her production company produces the kind of pornographic films I could watch with my partner; a shared experience. Feminist and queer approaches gain significance in the field. Sharing different perspectives on one object is generally helpful to understand the said object. This goes not only for porn. At the beginning of the COVID19 pandemic, PornHub offered free access to their exclusive premium content in countries such as Italy, which imposed a hard lockdown. Spending only hours, not to mention days quarantining, bored in a house and in a house bored, masturbating is usually a thought that comes to mind. According to several news outlets, porn consumption has increased over the past year. Presumably for the same cause then the increase of podcasts of random people just talking randomly about thing in life; mimesis. Listening to podcasts, group Zoom calls or watching porn is a virtual re-confirmation of being a real human being, whose individual identification is in relation to its peers.
I find this intriguing and would count it to the beautiful, messy synchronicity with potential and chance of meeting that I call urbanity.
During long lonely walks through a Copenhagen in lockdown, I have caught myself a few times glimpsing through these oversized windows, which meant to absorb the light of the low laying Scandinavian sun. Fantasizing about an erotic encounter between the ubiquitous PH designer lamps and monstera plants of Danish city life. The Standard Hotel in New York, situated right underneath The High Line gained fame for being a voyeuristic hotspot. The enormous glass facade invites both sides to watch and perform. I find this intriguing and would count it to the beautiful, messy synchronicity with potential and chance of meeting that I call urbanity. And I miss it deeply. Despite the commonly used practices of abstraction, such as mapping, in its true, un-idealised form the city should not be objectified; turned into an object to be studied or fetishized as part of a spectacle or a set of requirements. Like a naked body potentially reveals plenty of information about a humans anatomy but conceals most other relevant information about the factual person.
The city, any city really, is what Timothy Morton describes as Hyperobject, to explain objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization, such as climate change and styrofoam. The city is the built and unbuilt space but also its inhabitants, their walks to the grocery store and memories of missing a train at the central station; an object so complex, a good way not to despair is embracing this complexity. To objectify the city is an impossible undertaking, inevitably the city, as a complex organism in which we are taking part, would come off badly. What a beautiful realization it is, however, instead of pinning the city down onto an image; to become part of this organism and be part of its immanent movement opposite to force movement upon it via restraints.
Sources:
Filmstill by Erika Lust XConfessions
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