Beauty and the Right to the Ugly

Beauty and the Right to the Ugly is a cinematic experiment set in Het Karregat, a multifunctional community centre in Eindhoven designed by Frank Van Klingeren, which sought to propitiate communal forms of habitation. Wendelien Van Oldenborgh examines the devenir -and failure- of this utopian architecture, while conceiving and implementing a filming methodology that translates architecture premises such as “open”, “user-led” and “participative” into cinematic devices. | Half-way between directing the participants, and letting them take the lead, the work functions as a performative enactment of the issues it addresses. It will thus be a continuation of the artist’s interest on filmmaking as a perfomative device and of her ongoing engagement in discussions on collectiveness, its intersection with the private and the role cultural production plays in this.