From Bunker To Immaterial. Art, preservation and the Third Reich's defenses along the European coast.

Xenia Vytuleva (Visiting Professor, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, NY)
Margherita Moscardini (Artist, winner of Premio New York, 2015)

The Nazi bunkers along the coast of Europe and Norway are in ruins, no longer serving as functioning architectural bodies or even as a record of violent human activity; they have become a new form of media, the abstract techno-basis of a new layer of coded information. Professor Xenia Vytuleva will discuss Margherita Moscardini's 1XUnknown, an ongoing project that seeks to re-think "Bunker Archaeology" and to unfold the potentialities of the Atlantic Wall, an extensive system of coastal fortifications built from 1942-1945.

Moscardini's project originates from research into solid inhabitable forms whose permanent nature expresses the way they belong to their context while -at the same time– they are emancipated from it. Distinct and clear, these structures, which are devoid of foundations, also act as "sculptures" which have an archetypal quality. They resemble what surrounds them: the local sand that was used in their concrete composition.