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.