House of Economy, Auckland 2010, catalogue text by Lars Bang Larsen

The current members of Learning Site are Rikke Luther and Cecilia Wendt. Learning Site collaborates with other individual or groups in relation to each of its projects. The project for Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon has been developed by Rikke Luther and comprises a self-composting edifice that rises between the ground and the first floors of the exhibition space. The title, The House of Economy, refers to the accumulation of wealth as the ultimate adventure of a world that is both held together and pulled apart by forces of capital. A building that parasites itself as an organic process in slow and continuous collapse, The House of Economy is a host body for an ecological system of disintegration, consisting of mushrooms and mycelium that feed on clay and straw. In part inspired by termitaries, in part by the decayed architecture of deregulated financial markets, it forms an allegory of the entropy of architectural and economical systems. It is surrounded by images and a text written by the artist and writer Anthony Iles.

Learning Site’s concerns – the meeting between environment, culture, labour, property rights, informal architectures, social and monetary economies – calls for a diversity of approaches which are connected by artistic means. This is their lesson number one: the re-imagination of social space, as presented in the art work’s combination of fascination, indignation and analysis.

Through House of Economy has an allegorical-critical slant with a historical perspective, Learning Site’s practice has also seen them embedded in specific local contexts. In Collected Material Dwellings (2005), Learning Site’s (working with Julio Castro) avowed didacticism turned into a Constructivist poetics of the social arena. TheDwellings were first set up in the outskirts of Monterrey, Mexico, where the local economy is largely driven by self-employment and collecting of discarded materials. Connecting this fact to the difficult housing situation in the area, Learning Site developed habitations made of used plastic bottles. Filled with sand and sewn together with metal wire, they can be used as building blocks that are comparable to concrete in strength. Covered with mortar, these plastic bottle walls can be made to resemble any regular building material yet cost approximately ten times less. More than just a proposal for a housing solution, the Collected Material Dwellings also have legal implications: In poor areas, such low-cost houses that appear to be difficult to demolish could help their occupiers claim ownership of unoccupied land.

Learning Site’s interest in self-organization becomes an aesthetic strategy that reflects back on their workshops, dwellings and ecological models as representations and embodiments of thought experiments. This is a structural-speculative approach that differs from art activism’s more functionalist orientation: hence Learning Site’s experimentalism delivers counter-images to what we thought we knew about the city, asking new questions where we previously only had premature answers. The result may or may not be solutions: what matters, first of all, is to be able to break open concepts and habits and ask the questions in a different way.

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