Empty University

The Empty University is a system of assembling furniture for a systematic purpose. This purpose is constituted by an unquestioned affirmation of a small scale gathering principle: the Empty University is a quest for specific forms of these meetings. The meetings engendered by the Empty University are characterized by their complementarity to the network. They are presentations of some functions of the network that still need physical presence to happen, mostly because of the happy impossibility of a discussion being held through networks. The situation of the Empty University is produced through systems of objects that are named “island of objects”; the “islands of objects” are maintained as stable sculptures, nevertheless let free for being transformed by any event which will happen in their realm and including a rigid protocol of repositioning the objects of an “island” in a predetermined same place. For any island of objects, repositioning is part of the work.

In this sense an “island of objects” operates in two modes. The first is the one in which we find it after the maintenance of its system of objects; it stands like a sculpture; it has an immobile monumental look. The island of objects in this case serves as a piece to be viewed, as a comment on its rigidity. The type of meeting it seems to propose becomes historical, as if it belongs to the past, as if it has already been lost; what we see -after the maintenance- is a monument of the fallen past of discussion.

But in the same time we also see in this same agglomeration of objects an invitation to try once more to settle there for a while as discourse performers; the objects even if they are always reset in a rigid position are also welcoming an eventual appropriation; The island of objects acts in the way the rigid disposition of a table and its chairs awaits a supper, but now through the hypothesis of a yet unformed protocol. An “island of objects” has the form of a quest for protocol. Its use is abstract because the call it introduces does neither belong to this era nor to any recognizable everyday routine. An island of objects is here to refer to a lost past but it also asks for a different future. Even if this seems to be a vain operation, even if the structure remains not appropriated, deserted and empty of the energy it would need to become an active part of a discussion, the setting or the inventor of this discussion, still it has this monumental look of an abstract loss.

In this sense the series of "islands of objects" are presented as time regulations; between an invitation to occupy a setting, a quest for a new protocol for its operation and a repositioning of an always identical order ever restored through a maintenance that guarantees the specific positioning as the permanently recurring order of the Empty University.

The Empty University includes a residential part that is composed as its Sleeping Area.