Schlachthäuser der Moderne / Slaughterhouses of Modernity

The film documentation of the buildings by two South American architects, who could not be more different, forms the basis of the film Slaughterhouses of Modernity. From 2005 onwards, the indigenous Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre (*1971) realised more than sixty projects in the city of El Alto over a short period of fifteen years. These projects, with their independent world of colour and form, represent a utopian setting away from the style and dictates imposed by Western modernism. Seventy years earlier, the Argentinian architect Francisco Salamone (1897–1959) erected a multitude of public buildings in the province of Buenos Aires within ten years, all imbued with the spirit of a fascist-futurist modernism. The „Stadtschloss“ project in Berlin’s Mitte serves as the third cornerstone for this investigation. The evidence of a pre-fascist Wilhelminism and a quirky South American fantasy about the core of National Socialism is the link that connects the buildings of Salamone and Mamani, which are relatively unknown in Europe, with the discourse on the double character of modernism, its oscillation between experiment and restoration.