A disused warehouse is not just the upshot of a social and economic system in crisis, but it is also a genuine cultural artefact that unequivocally characterises the widespread urban fabric of the Veneto region. An urbanised and seamless landscape that, flourishing along the main road infrastructure, has grown in a disorganised manner through the accumulation of buildings and their uses. Then as now, economic growth is generated by sacrificing land, natural resources, labour, capital and time. A disused warehouse is indeed an expense as well as an unnecessary waste of resources.

Alessandro Cugola’s project wrongfoots the preordained programme, building a semantic bridge between the disused warehouse at Villa Filanda Antonini and the concept of ‘expenditure’ as formulated by French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille. Bataille offers the narrative cues for a three-act installation that, in contrast with the logic of architectural reappraisal, outlines a liturgy of symbols and words where the object of sacrifice is architecture itself.

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I’d rather be eaten by Alessandro Cugola

The notion of ‘expenditure’ as conceptualised by Georges Bataille is interesting in terms of interpreting this accumulation process. Bataille argued that societies should move beyond a solely utilitarian perspective, embracing an understanding of excess, waste and the non-utilitarian aspects of human existence. In this view, he writes, the gift “…must be considered as a loss and thus as a partial destruction, since the desire to destroy is in part transferred onto the recipient.” 

In order to read the useless outgrowth that the landscape has accumulated, rather than focusing on its re-use or implementation, we might want value the amount of land buried beneath it and which was sacrificed, and the waste it created not as a missed opportunity or a reminiscence of a successful past, but rather in the idea of the destruction of a system such buildings represent.

The act of loss without a return becomes fruitful to the extent it questions the modality and processes of production and value conversion. In a system that has constantly played losses off against gains, the territory has been sold off in the name of something else: cycles of consumption have eroded the soil; the seemingly unlimited emptiness, privatised for growth, is now to be found in the building, the ruin, still standing but ‘wasted’, only to be donated to uncertainty: an irreversible a concrete footprint impulse of immortality.

The notion of expenditure and the sacrifice around it is about loss and waste for the sake of it, yet it is the transitory state that they define 

which is valuable, as it has the capacity to recognise the self and the body at play as an effect of the other, and in general in its relation to the 

system in which the body is inserted. Architecture organises the space through which bodies move, and as such, bodies perceive architectural structures to be static, while they themselves move through space and time. 

Architecture codifies systems and remains: its timing often does not correspond to or struggles to adapt to transformations, hence it keeps shaping the body, which denies its radical and destructive spirit. As abandonment spreads across the territory, the notion of its sacrifice allows us to turn this around, in the name of the body that defines and perceives the space. This allows us to bring the static immanence of 

architecture down into its actual fragility, as its codes, rules and liturgies ‘make sense’ in certain moments and fall apart in others, leaving behind a massive amount of waste as if to testify to it.

Thus we shall ‘sacrifice’ these leftovers, and by doing so, define them for what they are: waste. Not useless from a productive point of view, but simply a void to be metabolised and liberated. I would like to read this act of destruction as their sacrifice, for its capacity to eradicate the 

leftover spatial relationships and the social order they govern, destroying not the architecture itself but the architectural organisation of bodies in space, rendering the space formless in return.

The space of this factory shall constitute the test for this sacrifice. And it is in the most archetypal elements that such narratives shall unfold: the bonfire, the body and the palimpsest.