fitness! commodity! delight!

The film is based on the idea that the camera is itself the medium through which the perceived straightness of architecture is constructed—and therefore also the medium through which it can be reimagined. Its point of departure is the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, whose layered architecture serves as a surface for interpretation: a Brutalist concrete structure on the lower level, surmounted by a more playful architectural language inherited from late Classicism. During the building’s renovation in 1987, architect Marcel Ferrier remarked that “there is no such thing as neutral space”, an idea that forms one of the film’s central conceptual foundations.

The film draws connections between a queer reading of architecture as a normative practice, the performance reading a room as a body, and the history of the building itself, whose basement once housed the city’s natural history collections. Just a few kilometres away, the Abbey Library of Saint Gall preserves a copy of De Architectura by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, rediscovered in St. Gallen during the fifteenth century and widely regarded as one of the catalysts for the rise of Neoclassicism. As the only surviving architectural treatise from antiquity, the text marks a pivotal historical moment in which a particular conception of architectural rectitude became established as the norm.

This local presence provides a conceptual thread running through the film, linking the objects exhibited in slant and the performance reading a room as a body to a broader constellation of architectural and historical references. An illustration depicting three figures, together with annotations found in Vitruvius’s writings, enters into an unexpected dialogue with the artworks. Footage filmed throughout the city extends this web of associations, reading St. Gallen itself as a cultural fabric within which the artistic intervention is embedded.