Cyber-PiraMMMida
By Barbara Penner
1 July 2020
We are currently in an extraordinary time.
A time of reversal.
A time of subversal.
A perfect time for (Cyber)PiraMMMida..
Sketches of proposal for Sale Docks by David Brodsky
Conceived by the Perverting the Power Vertical (PPV) collective, PiraMMMida was originally planned as an installation, a deconstructed pyramid, to be built by artists, architects, academics and activists in the S.a.L.E. Docks in Venice. The installation was a heterotopic riff on the official 17th Venice Architecture Biennale of Architecture’s theme of ‘How will we live together?’
Rather than assuming commonality is straightforwardly achievable, PiraMMMida took a different starting point – pyramid schemes – and asked how the ‘fake horizontal’ of the financial pyramid scheme is re-manifesting itself today, in the form of crypto-currencies like BitCoin, digital social platforms and sharing economies. Yet PiraMMMida was not trapped in hopelessness. In seeking to build a pyramid that could be traversed, transformed or collapsed without crushing those at its base, it proposed that a new non-fake form of equalitarian sociality could be created.
Sketches of proposal for Sale Docks by Natalia Romik
With COVID-19, however, the construction of the deconstructed pyramid has been delayed and the Venice Biennale itself has been postponed (until 2021). But the need for PiraMMMida and its exploration of the spatialities of power – horizonality and verticality, equality and hierarchy – have never felt more urgent.
Each day brings a new unmasking: the political line that we are ‘all in it together’ [the original theme of the 2020 Architecture Biennale, proposed by curator Hashim Sarkis) has not held in the face of revelations about how the pandemic and its remedies disproportionately affect those at pyramid’s base: the poor, people of color, manual workers. As leading figures in government unapologetically visit England’s beauty spots and openly violate lockdown, the point is literally driven home: we may be in it together, but we are not equally subject to the pandemic’s vicissitudes. PiraMMMida’s sniffing out of fake universalism – all those war-tinged platitudes - and its search for new forms of solidarity is to be welcomed.
Still from Hoetep Blessings by Tabita Rezaire
Perverting the Power Vertical has responded to this moment by transforming PiraMMMida into a digital project, Cyber-PiraMMMida: Power / Planet / Plague. While there may be no substitute for the creative resistant bursts released by human interaction and improvised building, the move into the digital realm – the latest home of fake horizontality – has an integrity of its own.
Visitors to Cyber-PiraMMMida will be offered the chance to ‘build’ using floating segments of material and content in the order they see fit. Through this exercise, Cyber-PiraMMMida throws down a gauntlet to users, offering the chance to collectively explore the shape a non-pyramidal digital community might take. Can entrenched tropes of power be “queered, transversed, subversed and perverted” through digital navigation and design? What forms of cyber-sociality might we together build?
Barbara Penner is Professor of Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her research covers a wide range of subjects: nineteenth-century commercial architecture (hotels and department stores); twentieth-century tourist destinations (honeymoon resorts); domestic spaces and technologies (bathrooms and kitchens); and urban infrastructure and its representations. She regularly lectures in institutions across the U.K., Japan, and North America, including at Aoyama Gakuin University, Cornell University, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. She serves as a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Architecture, and is currently chair of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.
