Garage Exchange

This sixteenth iteration of the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series, brings together Christoph a. Kumpusch of Forward-slash ( / ) Architektur and artist Youmna Chlala.
Salt Works proposes a speculative field of what remains.
As urban sites adjust to fluxing climates, we offer extraction as a strategy for uncovering future possibilities. We imagine a process much like desalination where salt is left behind. We consider the sludge. What affect does it have on its original environment? What do the vibrations reveal? What do the patterns foretell?
In Salt Works: Site 1 we begin in a suspended garage-space in Los Angeles. The sounds are under water and earth, taken from within the space itself and from multiple LA typologies and topologies. In the space of the gallery, temporal encounters create new associations as we imagine new ways of moving through the shifting ground. We engage variations of scale including the urban, intimate and infinite. They are absorbed and invented, appear and disappear:
1:100
1:25000
1:20
3:1
1:50
1:500
1:50000
2:1
1:1
1: ∞ …INFINITY (∞), along with its symbol ∞, is not a number and it is not a place. There is no limit to its values. We then say that the values become infinite, or tend to infinity – a limit is a number.
There is no number that we can name.
About the Artists:
Forward-slash ( / ) Architektur is a multidisciplinary practice founded in 2008 and directed by Christoph a. Kumpusch. Back-slash, the experimental arm of Forward-slash ( / ), investigates technology and material effects on form and tectonics. It grounds its work in a concentrated research program focused on architectural details and the spawning of new buildings from the smallest parts outward. A theoretical project runs parallel to this work, identifying historical and cultural contexts triggered by detail innovation. The office is both a design and publishing outfit, producing essays, books, exhibitions, installations, podcasts, performances, films, and buildings.
In 2010 Youmna Chlala and Christoph a. Kumpusch co-founded the Institute of Mutating Cities.
Forward Slash was the winner of an international competition to build the first ever hub and theater-space for Performa 15 – a world-renowned venue for performing arts in New York’s TriBeCa. In 2018 the studio competed and was shortlisted in the Burning Man Temple competition. Recent projects include an elephant playground and water park in Patong, Thailand; a co-working-space in Shoreditch, London and a feasibility study for a theater in Havana, Cuba. The first of 10 storefronts for the gender-fluid non-binary fashion brand Verv.London is currently under construction in Hackney/London. The construction of “Lineatur”, a house at the intersection of Austria-Slovenia-Hungary will break ground in January 2020.
Christoph a. Kumpusch is a New York-based architect and the Head of Forward Slash ( / ) Architektur, the Co-Founder of the Mutating-Cities Institute and the Director of the Extraction Laboratory at Columbia GSAPP, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he teaches Design and Visual Studies in its Architecture and Real Estate programs.
Kumpusch was a Leonardo da Vinci Fellow and a Rudolf M. Schindler Scholar, MAK Center Architect in Residence, USAA Scholar, National Collegiate Engineering Award-winner and a 2013 and 2015 Graham Foundation Grantee. Kumpusch is co-author of System Wien; editor of IDEA(u)topsy; IDEA(L); Built Ideas; The Light Pavilion (Lars Müller Publishers, 2013); Urban Hopes – Made in China (Lars Müller Publishers, 2014) and Detail Kultur – If Buildings Had DNA (AADCU, 2016). From 2015-2018 he coordinated the Core I Architecture Studios at Columbia GSAPP. Christoph Kumpusch has previously taught at the Cornell University’s AAP, Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Architecture +Planning, Ohio State University, Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture and the Department of Humanities and Media Studies, and SCI-Arc. He has been an invited juror at Harvard University, Yale University, The Architectural Association, Bartlett and Greenwich University in London and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture in Marseille and served as an external advisor of the Architectural Association’s PhD colloquium.
Youmna Chlala is an artist and a writer whose work investigates the relationship between fate and architecture through drawing, sculpture, prose and performance.
She participated in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018), Lofoten Bienal (2017), Performa Biennial (2011) and has exhibited widely including at the Hayward Gallery, Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Drawing Center, Dubai Art Projects, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Camera Austria, ICA London, Hessel Museum of Art and Art In General. She is the Co-Director of the Mutating Cities Institute. Her book of poetry, The Paper Camera, is forthcoming by Litmus Press in 2019. She is the recipient of a 2018 O. Henry Award, Joseph Henry Jackson Award and founding editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. Her writing appears in publications such as BOMB, Guernica, Bespoke, CURA, Prairie Schooner and MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies. She is a Professor in the Humanities & Media Studies and Writing at the Pratt Institute.
Forward-slash ( / ) Architektur:
Christoph a. Kumpusch with Youmna Chlala
Exhibition Team L.A.:
Khoa Vu, project architect
Morgan Starkey, exhibition architect
Cymaticslab, technical consultant
Ky Vu, head of animatronics
Paris Nelson, designer
Audrey Marie Dandenault, research lead
Paula Marschalek, interaction
Vitor Eiji, interventionist
Christof Lang / Restmüll, graphics