In the exhibition „Nobody wohnt hier nicht mehr“ at WALDEN, the works of EVOL, Alekos Hofstetter and Robert Sokol lead us to new artistic statements about the distance that our society now maintains to modernist architecture and its idea of progress.

The theme of the Berlin artist Evol is urban landscapes and buildings. Evol transforms rectangular shapes such as cardboard boxes or large concrete blocks into "architecture" by designing them as house facades. Inspired by the photographs that Evol takes on his forays through the city, the artist makes spray templates for his works: cardboard boxes become blocks of houses, and the grey electricity or telecom boxes on the street are converted into prefabricated buildings. At the forefront of Evol's work is the question of the social consequences of modernist architecture for our urban present. And the relevance of this artistic orientation is given an additional charge by the inexorably advancing process of gentrification and is depressingly topical.

The exhibition "Nobody no longer lives here" deals with the relationship between architecture and the concept of progress against the horizon of the visual arts. Similar to architects, visual artists are perceived as agents of progress. In the visual arts, the metaphor of progress is determined by the creative and aesthetic discourse relevance, whereas in the case of architects, the attribution of a construction principle to a designer is crucial. Thus, the architect guarantees control, stability, permanence and progress in a world where this is becoming increasingly impossible. For the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, architecture is the "last fortress of metaphysics" in the sense of the material, constantness and temporal expansion of the architectural, because it represents a presence that stands not only for itself, but for both others and later. Architecture can thus be a visible imposition compared to other impositions that disappear as soon as they were there. The decisive factor in modernity is the idea that progress corresponds to a unified reason, an idea, a will. That is why the concept of architecture can be used as a metaphor for the building plan. And it is therefore not decisive what the aesthetic looks like, but that a construction plan itself becomes perceptible in the aesthetic.

It is the construction principle of the reasonable that constitutes the metaphor of progress in modernity. And this also explains why architects are repeatedly asked about things that have nothing to do with architecture in the narrower sense. They are asked how we should live.

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