Experiments in entropy

The second law of thermodynamics states that as energy is transformed, it incrementally dissipates and tends towards loss, decay and waste. This is the process of entropy; a process of mutual construction and demolition - and an admission that time is perhaps the most present and yet seemingly most anonymous protagonist in the physics of production. It applies to societies and to systems, as it does to our natural environment, and has generated curiosity since its peak in art production in the sixties.

It is a meta-narrative for our more micro realities to perform against. This exhibition invites ten architects who collectively started architecture school a decade ago to investigate trajectories of this narrative in their daily grind. The group has come together and dissipated at different times across the past ten years, making their own growth an entropic process in itself.

In processes of construction, climate adaptation, planning, real estate, monument-making, and cultural production, architecture plays a mediating role. The architect is an agent of how time performs within built and unbuilt environments. Challenging the role of the architect and transposing it within the context of a contemporary art gallery, the group is presenting independent works that illustrate its collective understanding of where and how entropy persists - and when and why architecture needs to perform.

Studying, graduating and working at a time of accelerated progress has made this a formative decade for the exhibiting group. The interests of the project are to provoke the definitions of the architect and re-examine the role it has in contemporary society. Using diverse media, the group of architects will occupy the contemporary art space to operate in ways that the industry or confines of the profession do not always allow it to. Returning to a position of critique, the exhibition assembles itself as a collective of individual findings, transforming the galleries at Valletta Contemporary into places for the introspection of the Maltese built and unbuilt context.. This, through the lens of the youngest of Malta’s generation of architects.

ten years ago i joined architecture school

curated by andrew borg wirth
MARIA AZZOPARDI ANDREW BORG WIRTH ISAAC BUTTIGIEG LUCIA CALLEJA JEAN EBEJER SUZI MIFSUD TRACEY SAMMUT FELIC MICALLEF MATTHEW SCERRI NICK THEUMA MIKE ZERAFa
Featuring a prologue with work by: NORBERT FRANCIS ATTARD, KANE CALI, KATRINA GALEA, Andrew galea
With special thanks to Bureau 105, Halmann Vella, the Faculty for the Built Environment, Openworkstudio, Debono Group, Camilleri Paris Mode, Bank of Valletta and ilabphoto.
02.12.2022-24.12.2022 11.01.2023-18.02.2023 tues-sat 1400-1900
valletta contemporary, east street, valletta