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EXPERIMENTS IN ENTROPY

02 December 2022 - 24 December 2022

11 January 2023 - 18 February 2023
Curated by Andrew Borg Wirth

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Installation view of EXPERIMENTS IN ENTROPY & EXPERIMENTS IN ENTROPY event poster

EXPERIMENTS IN ENTROPY

Ten Years Ago I Joined Architecture School


Curated by Andrew Borg Wirth
Participating artists: 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, Young Architects

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. 

With special thanks to Bureau 105, Halmann Vella, the Faculty for the Built Environment, Openworkstudio, Debono Group, Camilleri Paris Mode and Bank of Valletta.

 

Andrew Borg Wirth (b.1993) is an architect and curator with an interdisciplinary practice across the fields of narrative, research, design and theatre.

 

His practice has developed through collaborative relationships with architecture, fashion and design studios, public cultural organisations and individual cultural practitioners across a variety of projects, alongside the development of bespoke interior, furniture and product design. Andrew graduated from an M (Arch.) Architectural Design from the University of Malta in 2017, and in 2021 concluded an MA in Culture, Criticism and Curations from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts in London.

 

Andrew’s research interests lie at the intersection between cultural and architectural discourse, dealing with nostalgia, public space, memory and trauma. Andrew is one of the co-founders of bloc, a creative collective focused on digital fabrication, product and furniture design.

 

Andrew received the 2022 Best Curatorial Practice Award from ARTZ ID (Malta) and the 2018 Galizia Award for Best Student Dissertation by Kamra tal-Periti (Maltese Chamber of Architects).

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