SCALELESS MODELS
12.02.2025 - 30.03.2025

Artist: Jonas Staal

Curator: Mihnea Mircan


Salonul de proiecte
Palatul Universul, Corp B, Floor 1
Actor Ion Brezoianu 23-25, București


Opening: Wednesday, February 12, 19.00

Invitro / Tudor and Geanina Grecu Collection and Salonul de proiecte present Scaleless Models, a selection of works by Jonas Staal, a Dutch artist who works at the intersection of art, democracy and propaganda. Staal’s wide-ranging practice includes tribunals, forums, camps, parliaments and other forms of assembly and communality, explorations in which architectural scale models are a recurring device. This exhibition takes the scale model as its motif, engaging Staal’s work through the operations of rational compression and imaginative expansion which the scale model performs. Here, the scale model is not the encapsulation or contraction of a larger architectural reality, but rather the embodiment of an abstraction which can be endlessly resized to fit a community or a nation, a biotope or the world. In the artist’s speculative models, political operations of significant real-world consequences but without an observable form are captured and translated, made literal and allegorized at the same time. Without a necessary correlation to real or possible buildings, or weaving such correlations with fictional and ideological threads, these “scaleless models” attempt to confine, within the boundaries of architectural form, otherwise uncontainable realities, forces and discourses whose political efficacy depends precisely on eluding or overcoming containment: on being without their own measure, while being themselves the measure of all things and lives.

Closed Architecture (2011) is a film based on a thesis submitted in 2004 for a Master’s degree at the Utrecht School of the Arts by Fleur Agema, then aspiring spatial designer and currently MP for the ultranationalist Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), as well as First Deputy Prime Minister in the cabinet appointed after Geert Wilders’ 2023 election victory. Agema’s text develops – with strikingly few illustrations to support her discourse – a plan for an ideal prison, a complex facility whose function is to reintegrate convicts into society through a sequence of disciplinary spaces and norms. Staal assigned himself the task of visualizing the proposal in detail, investigating the extent to which architectural text functions as a blueprint for the author’s ideological views and political position, as the metonym of a worldview or as a model for governance. The prison is gradually envisioned as a trajectory between sections that function as a dungeon, a military camp, a commune and a simulation of social life under heavy electronic surveillance, with any misstep risking to send the convict all the way to the beginning of the process of atonement. Along the way, the artist inquires indirectly into social mutations in The Netherlands and beyond, brought about by the steady rise of populism, into the growing prevalence of tropes of crisis, scapegoating and exclusion.

Nosso Lar, Brasília (2013) looks at the remarkable overlaps between two city plans elaborated in Brazil between 1944 and 1956, one founded on Spiritist culture and the other on high modernist architecture. These are Nosso Lar (“Our Home”), the Spiritist capital city situated within the superterrestrial ether, and the administrative capital Brasília, founded in 1960 to replace Rio de Janeiro in its political role. Although the metaphysical project of Spiritism and the organizational efficacy of modernist architecture seem to be naturally in opposition to one another, the project proposes that in their similarities these city models articulate a shared project to engineer society. Topographic studies and a scale model showing the superposition of sections from these theoretically distinct modes of organizing celestial and terrestrial bureaucracies situate the two cities within a parallel history: too different to be the same, yet too much the same to be entirely different. A film discusses the unconscious complicity between the project of architect Lúcio Costa (assisted by Oscar Niemeyer, Joaquim Cardozo and Roberto Burle Marx) and influential medium Chico Xavier’s books on the Astral City, cutting across conventional divisions within modernity. Histories are not conflated, but rather portrayed as convergent movements that shaped contemporary Brazilian society by appealing to recurrent values and principles. As experiments in embodying dominant ideas that have circulated throughout Brazilian history, they translate ideological precepts into concrete or spectral infrastructures with the capacity to govern and discipline their inhabitants’ actions..

The video essay Propaganda Theater (2023) brings together different examples of how political propaganda stages and forges new realities: from Vladislav Surkov, former playwright, businessman and architect of Vladimir Putin’s doctrine of “sovereign democracy”, to the massive theatrical pre-enactment of wars by the US military at Fort Irwin. The video reflects on the role that artists – filmmakers, game designers, architects, writers or theater directors – play in creating the scripts, building the set designs and animating the mass performances of contemporary propaganda, in creating reality on the theater stage of politics. Staal understands propaganda as a “performance of power”: the infrastructures of mass communication are aligned with the visual and narrative means necessary to enact a new reality, to coproduce an image that can no longer be distinguished from the preexisting reality it is addressed to. The work is partly filmed within miniature replicas of two environments, interiors without exteriors, or whose exterior is in a sense the world stage with its violent divisions. The Situation Room in the White House, Washington, and the National Defense Management Center in Moscow are the sets that appear here in scalar diminution – scaled in fact to correspond to the screens that are inserted in their command panels, broadcasting disparate signals, news and their re-editing, cultural noise and political emotion. These sinister spaces are explored as if by an endoscopic camera, suggesting a metabolism, equally fleshly and technological, for digesting, filtering and transforming reality, a stomach as much as an editing room for world history.

Empire’s Island (2023) tells the story of Ascension Island, located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, via a series of telescopic movements that zoom in on this speck of land and its histories, and then zoom out to the scales of empire, planet and stratosphere. A double model of the island – dry and uninhabited to left, geo- and techno-engineered to the right –, accompanied by a video essay, suggests a recursive history of this distant place, whose past might return as our future. Throughout the centuries the island has been altered in the image of the ideological, economic and military interests of an emerging global structure of power. This began with the Dutch empire that used the inhospitable island as a penitentiary, to exile – and indirectly condemn to death – crew members of the East India Company, and continued with the British empire, for which Charles Darwin geoengineered the island: its climate was transformed, “made productive” by bringing to the island hundreds of trees from the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, trees which had been previously gathered from all the British colonies. In this early case of intentional terraforming, the island began to produce its own humid climate, and function like a vegetal, biopolitical synecdoche of imperial might. More recently, a transnational empire of planetary and interplanetary surveillance infrastructures encroached upon the island. Ascension Island is claimed as a “nobody’s land” (terra nulius) as much as it is, in Staal’s demonstration, an “everybody’s land”, endlessly modeled to sustain these imperial propagations. It is a test site for political systems that re-scale and dis-place whole environments, a territory of geological and ecological plasticity where different versions of the future are compressed and expanded, assembled and enacted.

Jonas Staal (born 1981 in Zwolle, currently based in Bern) is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing). With Florian Malzacher, he co-directs the camp Training for the Future (2018-ongoing), and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon he initiated the collective action lawsuit Collectivize Facebook (2020-ongoing). With writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza he founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (2021-ongoing) and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union. Exhibition projects include Museum as Parliament (with the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2018-ongoing), We Demand a Million More Years (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2022), Extinction Wars (with Radha D'Souza, Gwangju Museum of Art, 2023) and Propaganda Station (Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 2024). His projects have been exhibited widely at venues such as the Cooper Hewitt - Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, V&A in London, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (where he was awarded the Prix de Rome in 2023), M_HKA in Antwerp, Centre Pompidou - Metz and the Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul, as well as the 7th Berlin Biennale, the 31st São Paulo Biennale, the 12th Taipei Biennale and the 14th Shanghai Biennale. His publications include Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (The MIT Press, 2019) and Climate Propagandas: Stories of Extinction and Regeneration (The MIT Press, 2024). Staal holds a PhD from Leiden University.



Organisers: Invitro / Tudor and Geanina Grecu Collection and the Salonul de proiecte Association

Supported by: Fundația Mondriaan, Amsterdam (NL)

Sponsor: Corcova Roy & Dâmboviceanu

Media Partner: Zeppelin