Provenance, Future Anterior
Wherever there is a transfer of anything ascribed value, there is provenance: on coffee beans, clothing tags, in the art market, on the construction site. Change requires stability, and provenance, at its most basic and ideal, aims at stabilizing claims of ownership and authorship in anticipation of possible transactions. As many previous editions of Future Anterior have shown, buildings as well as monuments are mutable, movable, and replicable. With this collection we bring together scholars, practitioners, artists, and educators who use provenance to look at transfers, misuse, adaptation, and reinvention across geographies and chronologies. These essays are not linked by a single topic like material reuse or restitution, but united by a way of seeing: Provenance here becomes a lens, a practice, a historical orientation.
From a variety of angles, the authors in this issue use provenance to connect extraction points with places of deposit, to stretch across the messy and rich centuries-long histories of buildings, to record the ways in which owners have transformed their property, revisit overlooked events of famous buildings, to question ownerships and authenticity, to assert the importance of custodians, and to track value changes in objects. Through history and practice, they look at how provenance can be used to construct and disrupt ownerships, to record and revalorize, and to recast buildings and their associated materials for new and uncertain futures. The contributions show that architectural provenance works across multiple temporalities and spatial registers: from the sourcing and extraction of materials, through construction and transportation, to occupation, alteration, maintenance, demolition, reuse, or recirculation. Together, they approach provenance as a method of writing, critique, and projection. As architecture moves, so too does its history.
This double-issue of Future Anterior is edited by Mari Lending, Alena Rieger, and Simon Mitchell. Contributors include: Matthew Mullane; Gustav Elgin; Alena Rieger; Alfredo Thiermann, Pedro Correa, Ella Neumaier, and Xavier Nueno; Thomas McQuillan; Nikos Magouliotis; Flavia Crisciotti; Amandine Kastler and Erlend Skjeseth; Charlotte Malterre-Barthes; Simon Mitchell; Nicholas Coates and Eskil Buskov Selmer; Lake Verea.
