fitness! commodity! delight!

“Fitness,” “commodity,” and “delight” is a misreading of a translation of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, the three pillars of architecture as stated by Marcus Vitruvius Polio in his first century BC treatise De Architectura. The film was conceived from the performance reading a room as a body (2025) at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and its analysis of the conservative teleology contained in European architecture. Fitness! Commodity! Delight! first considers the museum itself within this analysis as well as the specifics of St. Gallen’s place in the history of architecture. 

The film follows and reinterprets both the performance in the brutalist architecture of Kunstmuseum St. Gallen’s lower floor, the former home of the Natural History Museum, as well as the architectural layers of the city itself. It was the 15th century rediscovery of the only known copy of De Architectura in the Abbey Library of St. Gallen that is often cited as the beginning of the neoclassical movement. The Kunstmuseum, with its neoclassical upper floor and exterior, enters a narrative connection with the Abbey Library, where the Vitruvius volume is held.

Some scenes were filmed with an off axis tilt-shift lens, the lens used in architectural photography to create the illusion of perfectly parallel lines, bending the focus of the image against its traditional use; instead of creating more parallel lines the off axis tilt shift creates an uncanny off kilter image. The lens is its own reading –bringing together various registers of texture in the recording as well as camera movement calibrated to the performers.

The three performers have a spectral presence in the film: from channeling and interpreting the architecture, they appear to inhabit it. This reading is grounded in the conditions of the shoot itself. The effect of the architectural lens combines with the emptiness of the space and the absence of an audience. This ghostly quality is mirrored sonically, when the energetic diagetic sound of the film’s opening scene returns as the inspiration to the track accompanying the final scenes of the performance, before the camera weaves in footage of the ants that used to be housed within the same brutalist lower level of the Kunstmuseum.  Is it the other way tho? by Miiel de la Mora and Kari Leigh Rosenfeld undergoes its own transformation alongside the film, shapeshifting from a dance track to polyrhythmic cumbia leading out of the museum as the film concludes.