Stainlessness production. Video by Signal Return.
We’ve been busy for the past month and a half designing a series of “capricios” (see image below for an example of a capricio) for Etienne Turpin’s exhibition titled Stainlessness at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. Here’s Etienne’s description of his project:
Stainlessness recuperates the tradition of the architectural ‘capriccio’ as a means to emphasize the history of labor movements in North America and to make legible the physical semblance of these movements in cities including Sudbury, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. While processes of urbanization have all but erased these struggles from our cities and left only ambivalent monuments to mark the past, the narrative of Stainlessness and its contemporary ‘capriccios’ assert the centrality of labor as a force capable of transforming the nature of cities, the culture of America, and the geologic deep-time marked by the Anthropocene.
Aldo Rossi’s Città Analoga, first presented at the 1976 Venice Biennale.
The Sudbury capriccio. Catie Newell photo.
Most of our Easter weekend was spent at Signal Return in Detroit, manually printing the drawings using a Vandercook printing press and milled magnesium plates. You can see a video of the process below. The exhibition of the work opened on Monday and runs until the end of the week. You can find more images of the process and the exhibition in our Work section.
Production of the Detroit capriccio. Catie Newell photo.
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