The 2023 Mark Cousins Annual Lecture with Anri Sala

Highlighting what it is to compose with and organise time, Anri Sala will delve into the 2021 film Time No Longer and his most recent fresco series, focusing on key themes such as multi-layered temporalities, intervals, ellipses, and spatial scaling that are fundamental to his work. Despite the distinct creative and technical processes involved in fresco making and CGI film production, he will explore the connections between these two methods, particularly in the context of the mineral aspect of time and how time settles according to its gravity or weightlessness.
Anri Sala constructs transformative, time-based works through multiple relationships between image, architecture, and sound, employing these as elements to fold, capsize, and question experience. His works investigate ruptures in language, syntax, and music, inviting creative dislocations, which generate new interpretations of history, supplanting old fictions and narratives with less-explicit, more-nuanced dialogues.
To commemorate the legacy of Mark Cousins’ teaching at the AA, the Mark Cousins Annual Lecture was established in 2022. This annual event is an opportunity to invite speakers whose work bears a kindred approach to Mark’s thinking about space, architecture, theory or culture, giving voice to the next generation and bringing Mark’s teaching to audiences old and new. An ongoing fundraising campaign aims to ensure that this annual event remains a highlight in the AA public programme for the next three decades. To learn more about the late Mark Cousins, one of the AA’s most influential architectural educators and critics, please visit the Mark Cousins Lecture Archive - a unique set of over 250 lecture recordings spanning his career available to watch online at www.aaschool.ac.uk/markcousins. There is also a book containing an edited selection of the lectures - Mark Cousins: Friday Lectures (ed. Parveen Adams) 2022.