Image 1 – How will we live together?
What will our societies lack to overcome the inherited bourgeois models and lifestyle? What will we need to shape our frustrated aspirations of solidarity and autonomy, of spiritual life and pleasures, not necessarily reduced to the coarse palette of consumption advertised urbi et orbi by media? Barthes’ beautiful obsession with a life governed both by communities and by ‘idiorhythm’ – the capacity of each individual to carry his own rhythm within a community, to obey his own idiosyncrasy and not the rigid rules of the Cistercians or the Soviet communes –, is a proposal that should be taken seriously in societies like ours, in which leisure and work are almost the same. Aged societies and with enormous rates of lonely people, staring at their smartphones, with serious problems of anxiety and solitude despite the many invisible networks that surround and manipulate us precisely because we are alone and helpless... Palaces of Insurgency, of a life closer to the desires of communion and solitude, palaces for bodies and spirits in plenitude.
Image 2 – Sneak peek of the project
Communal Atemporal Palaces is an academic research based in two courses entitled How to Live Together? directed by Iñaki Ábalos at Harvard GSD in Boston and at the ETSAM in Madrid. Inspired by the homonymous course by Roland Barthes, as well as on the book of the same title that includes his lectures taught at the Collège de France between 1976 and 1977, these courses were focused on the idea of “Palace”, in the notion of “Timelessness” and in the concept of “Communes”, assembled in a single search that could be enunciated with a Nietzschean-inspired question: What is missing above all in our big cities? What is lacking in our societies?