Exhibition Architecture: Emotional Landscapes

DPStudio uses art, theory, and a community of artists and thinkers as the medium through which we explore and develop what we like to call emotional landscapes. This lecture will be about how we try to design spaces that live on our memories and hopefully outlive the short life expectancy of some exhibition projects. Something you saw as a child, that you read in a book, listened to in a club, or saw in a movie might be used as abstract references and starting points to develop a space. Confusion, Disorientation, Control, Love, Ambiguity, Climax and Desperation are narratives that are likely to be encountered in one of the studio’s projects, and our goal is, together with different practitioners, to try to increase the lexicon of feelings we can draw from and explore. Whether the task is to develop a spatial installation for one video or to design a space for 70 artists, the premise is always the same: to try to identify what we want the audience to feel and what memories they will bring home. Although we work with memories, we are unafraid to hijack others’ experiences. The only rule we like to stand by, if we have any, is to try not to use the studio’s own projects as references, as that would be dreaming in a loop, most likely causing our obsessions to end in nightmares.

Diogo Passarinho is a Portuguese architect. In 2015, he founded the research-based design studio DPStudio, based in Berlin. The studio has designed the exhibition architecture for the Venice Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, BalticTriennial, Hayward Gallery, Palais De Tokyo, Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Oslo National Museum and the Van Abbemuseum, to name a few examples. Diogo works with a variety of clients from different fields, maintaining a strong focus on the cultural realm. His practice encompasses architecture, exhibition and furniture design, research, writing, and curatorial projects. He has also been working closely with artists such as Hito Steyerl, Laure Prouvost and The Otolith Group, among many others. Passarinho has been invited to be on the board of different architectural and art magazines, including frieze d/e, Horizonte, Generalist, Mould, Arch+ and Jornal Arquitectos, collaborating more regularly with the New York based Pin-upmagazine.

This talk is a part of the lecture series Critical Tools, part of the public program at the Academy of Fine Art – the full program can be found here