Lan Tuazon

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Pruitt Igoe was a large housing project in Missouri, designed by Monoru Yamasaki, built in 1956 and demolished by 1976. Three of seven public housing buildings of the Sails of Scampia in Naples were destroyed in 2003 while the rest lay in ruins. On March 30, 2011, the last building of the infamous Cabrini Green Houses fell to the wrecking ball. Yet as notable public housing structures are destroyed, they are also being built in other places. There are many critiques that point to the failures of public housing, but none so great that the idealism of affordable housing should be dispensed with entirely. Thus in 2009, the Pinnacle at Duxton, the tallest public housing structure in the world, was completed in Singapore.

At Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Lan Tuazon examined and researched various structures of uto-pias, mass public housing projects, and socialist buildings from the 1960s and 1970s. Tuazon’s main interest was on the master narrative of class struggle and the physical form that represents mass and multitude. Her sculptural work develops new techniques of augmented sculpture, where video is mapped and projected onto a three-dimensional object.

Lan Tuazon presented her work and working methods at Julia Prager’s seminar Literary Theories—Public/s at the Institute of Languages and Literatures, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Innsbruck, held in the summer semester 2012.