WHY WE PUBLISH (BOOKS ON BIENNIALS) DPR-BARCELONA “Hundreds of thousands get made, blood, sweat and editorial tears go into them, yet barely a whimper is told about their relative merits.” — Brendan Cormier about Venice Biennale Books1 Making books is not an exact science. There are several factors determining whether a publishing venture will have a happy ending. First you need a topic that appears timely and interesting, then you need a potential audience for the publication. After this, there is the question of the material and human resources needed for its completion. In the case of books for bi(tri)ennials, most of the factors mentioned above are already in place: courtesy of the curator you certainly have a topic, you also have several audiences ranging from the visitors to the event to people interested in the topic and, gaining weight more recently, you have the audiences conjured up by the PR offices taking care of exhibitors’ communication strategy. There is also the question of funding, which in most of the case relies on public sector cultural agencies or private companies that support culture.1 And there is also the institutions’ interest in seeing a tangible outcome from their participation in events that are both cultural tours de force and dynamic agents for new research, because biennials have demonstrated that disciplinary knowledge is no longer produced only within academia.2 Following the agenda of placing the host city/region on the map of contemporary cultural production, the events themselves trigger site-specific knowledge and open up new research topics related to contexts that would otherwise not be possible to come out solely from the walls of Academia.
As we can see, the inexact science of making books has all the ingredients for success in the case of books for biennials. So why are they so rarely referred to during and after those events? How is it possible that after years of research, countless nights of editing, and printing rushes, not to mention distribution adventures, there is relatively little reverberation from the material produced and printed as a book? Performance killed the critical-thinking star In ‘The Biennale Syndrome’, Carolyn-Christov Bakargiev notes that the accelerated growth of biennial events since the early 1990s parallels the rise of the Internet. With respect to architecture, the biennials are becoming the ultimate vehicle of communication at a time when communication is the ultimate objective of consumer culture.3 To the interest in documenting the exhibited installation or pavilion, we must add the visitors’ selfies testifying to their attendance at the event. Paired with this selfie culture, or maybe fueled by it, there is the increase in performative actions accompanying installations. Performativity then seems like the right strategy to attract attention at a time of excessive communication. If performance and immediacy are the contemporary methods for communicating knowledge, it is not strange that books go largely unnoticed, except for the brief raising of a toast to celebrate their launch. For instance, in the recent Bed-In conversations, Beatriz Colomina, professor and architectural historian, explored the role of the bed in the architecture of the
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