2019 | 1st Edition

Beautiful plateau - Fascículo 18

Francisco Varela

RuinSonic YouthDestructionArchitecture

«(...) The Destroyed Room is the image that graces the cover and lends its title to the 2006 album by the New York-based band Sonic Youth. With the subtitle "b-sides and rarities," it brings together a collection of eleven songs that, while not exactly leftovers, result from a certain randomness in their sequence. Of different origins, ranging from improvisation and experimentation sessions, excerpts from noise jam sessions, unfinished songs, or unreleased recordings, it is a thoughtful gathering of fragments, illustrated in the album's booklet with details from Jeff Wall's photography. It is from The Destroyed Room that we draw the title for this booklet: Beautiful Plateau, a song whose harmony emerges from a scenario of destructive drift. It is hard not to think of The Destroyed Room when looking at the photographs that Francisco Varela produced in the cinema, hotel, and swimming pool building of the Foco residential complex, initiated in the 1960s in the city of Porto under the coordination of architect Agostinho Ricca. In doing so, we free the images from the inherent neglect that dragged a reference architectural work into the "rubbish ranking" in such a short period, using the language of the financial market. While not neglecting to denounce and lament the current state of the building, perpetuated by strange real estate interests, we are more interested in thinking of these photographs as something that resonates in the same harmony as Beautiful Plateau. (...)» Susana Lourenço Marques and Pedro Bandeira, 2019