We, all of us, city dwellers, are essentially flâneurs. Because the flâneur’s way of life is to never stop, only the city around him sometimes standing still before the power of his gaze. Architecture is frozen music, they say. Thus, we cannot view urban space as anything other than a paradoxical freezer: it freezes those hybrid, multidimensional, and polyphonic urban structures whose essence and raison d’être lie precisely in constant spatial and historical-ideological movement.
Community and commonality spring from the same source. The public sphere belongs to everyone and no one at the same time. It is simultaneously self-evidently open and continuously and definitively intermediate. The place that is nowhere, the property that belongs to no one and nothing, reveals itself only to the flâneur, the observer who gazes at the city with eternal indifference: it shows him that the virtual city’s real infinity, the real city’s virtual infinity, the utopias slumbering in non-places, and the non-places awakening from utopias can all coexist within it.
top_OS csop_Ort is an open, transdisciplinary collective for research into place, time, and the city, or, if you like, an association of imaginative flâneurs. In this exhibition, five key figures, founding members, undertake a visual and conceptual presentation of the temporalities, transitory states, and time and space paradoxes inherent in the built and conceptual spaces of urbanity, each consistently representing their own unique aesthetic and articulatory methodology, while at the same time creating a unified, frozen urban landscape.