Photo by Common Accounts, 2021.
Part of Common Accounts’ fellowship project for the Spanish Academy
in Rome, “Refresh Renew” was originally installed in San Pietro in
Montorio Square, and is on display at the Azkuna Zentroa of
Bilabo, Spain, from October 2021 to February 2022.
This project continues the line of research on
the subject of architecture’s role in the intersection of death and dailylife.
By rearticulating gym traditions and technologies, “Refresh, Renew”
focuses on the increasing production and circulation of bodies and
their images and capitalizes on their capacity to construct vast personal
archives as a project of eternalization.
Recent cases of online funeral
memorialization through the practice of fitness have brought to the
surface a long historical lineage of the relationship between body-culture
and death that span from the practice of athletics on Etruscan funerals
to the development of contemporary mass fitness by the North American
military apparatus. In this context, Facebook’s first significant encounters
with death —prompted by a fitness coach claiming access to the digital
file of his dead son— shows the displacement of spaces of mourning to
areas like the comments section of a YouTube channel, a home-gym, or
muscle itself.
Photo by Common Accounts, 2021.
Photo by Common Accounts, 2021.
Photo by Special Thanks Studios, 2021.
Photo by Common Accounts, 2021.
Photo by Common Accounts, 2021.
Photo by Common Accounts, 2021.
© Common Accounts / 2022 / hi@commonaccounts.online