Vesper 11 - Miserabilia

Today, misery in Western societies is exiled to a historical, geographical, and cultural elsewhere. The magazine’s eleventh edition focuses on spaces and spectres of misery in imagination and reality. It addresses the removal of the spaces where misery exists in the concrete and immaterial context in favour of quantifiable poverty, and the presence of buildings in cities as evidence of a past in which poverty was a matter of governance and planning. In the past, misery took majestic forms in Italy, for instance, the Scuole Grandi of Venice and the almshouses for the poor. If the monumentality of misery expressed an aesthetics, the architecture of poverty rejects it in the name of functionality.