Despite its economy of presentation – just text and video, nothing flashy or interactive – the installation #mythomaniaS at the Chicago Architecture Biennial offers a density of thought at once alluring and abstruse. In this, it well conveys the concerns and formal strategies of its slippery authors, the Bangkok-based French-born collective currently known as New-Territories, but also M4 (MindMachineMakingMyths), formerly R&Sie (a near homophone of heresy in French), and occasionally François Roche and Camille Lacadée. 

A set of monitors plays several of their mesmerizing and visually-lush videos that were made in collaboration with some of the most influential artists of the day, including Pierre Huyghe and Carsten Holler. Filmed across the world, from Bangkok and its environs to the snow-covered Swiss Alps, they should be read as “architectural scenarios,” something like provocations or insinuations of possible ways of relating to a context. “Environments and paranoia as symptoms of an inner condition, in a constant exchange between narrative and emergence,” states an accompanying text. Visually, these videos tend towards a particular repertoire of techniques; chiefly, vignette-like blurred edges that induce a febrile sensation in the viewer. 

At their best, Roche and Lacadée have a unique ability to conjure new worlds into reality. Populated by feral children, shy robots, and Tourette’s patients, their films probe the boundaries between the fictive and the real, the human and the nonhuman, the rational and the irrational. There is an abiding concern – perhaps one that verges on a fetishization – for psychopathologies and illness. All of this also makes its way into their architectural practice. Or, rather, their built practice merges with their video work, experiments with robotics, essays and other writings. New-Territories / M4 are squarely positioned in the (sizable) camp of Chicago Biennial participants who would likely prefer to forever banish the refrain “Is it architecture?” 

And really, the question is moot when discussing the work of such capable trans-disciplinarians. New-Territories / M4 invoke nearly every concern at the cutting edge of contemporary architectural thinking – from post-humanism to globalization to emerging economic structures to robotic technologies – without indulging in that debilitating tendency of architects to claim a single issue as their signature concern. Yet they also don’t suffer from the inverse problem; their purview is large, but their research remains focused. It seems that they place the prescription to single-issue thinking itself near the top of their (long list) of rules to be broken, which would also probably include any normative definition of architecture. “The ‘forbidden’ is reintroduced as a possible, and what was rejected as an improper ingredient within our computer graphic idealization of the world is coming back…” they write.

Unfortunately, the two fragments I have quoted are among the few that are likely legible to those without at least some exposure to late 20th century continental philosophy. This isn’t necessarily a problem in itself – experimental academic writing has its place, including in the architectural sphere – unless you’re an architect whose self-styling as heretic is tethered to an anti-authoritarian position. Both during the opening week (in the interest of full disclosure: specifically during an event hosted by Archinect, over the course of an interview I conducted) as well as more recently on Facebook, Roche and Lacadée decried the “hygienist strategy” of the Biennial curators and participants, their “bio-politics, greenish-color and bottom-up slumy romanticism.” 

Let it be said, such an internally-generated critique felt largely, and noticeably, lacking at the Chicago Biennial. I applaud New-Territories/M4 for their willingness to bite the hand that feeds. Auto-critique and – to be frank – outright antagonism have historically been, and continue to be, vital to a discipline that is more likely to dislocate a shoulder patting itself on the back then notice – let alone admit to – its own bad behavior. And, without getting into particularities I can’t (or am not equipped to) handle here, their criticism likely had its merits. But I doubt many were able to parse it.

In short, Roche and Lacadée employ a verbose, often-inscrutable prose of the post-Deleuzian variety: full of hyphens, neologisms, and other linguistic ‘becomings.’ I suspect that today, rather than signal towards the radical, emancipatory potentials of the philosophies it mimes, this writing style tends to primarily evoke pretension, academicism, and general elitism. It’s a mode of writing that has been thoroughly institutionalized by three to four decades of manhandling and mistreatment by art gallerists and architecture thesis candidates. 

Unfortunately, for at least a few visitors to the Biennial, this will foreclose a wonderful encounter with one of Roche and Lacadée's strange worlds, let alone an archi-political revelation.