In his 1921 essay ‘Laziness: The Real Truth of Humankind’, Russian-Ukrainian artist Kazimir Malevich wrote: ‘Work is an instrument to reach the truth, but laziness is the real truth of mankind’. He suggested that if the capitalist system promotes the right and freedom to work, its counter-project is the right to be lazy. Laziness, or lazy action, defies the notion of property, breaking free from cycles of production, possession and exchange. It cracks open the inherent paradox of space as both a resource and commodity, instead inhabiting it as a process. Laziness distorts linear time and thus dismantles the scientific regime of labour management, efficiency and the aestheticisation of property. It destabilises space as a secure asset while rendering it a continuous process of making and unmaking. From wastelands and exhausted landscapes to dormant infrastructure and protected buildings, these inoperative spaces suggest modes of resistance that interrupt exploitative processes through unproductive performance, slowness and, ultimately, a withdrawal from capitalist value systems. Such a pause creates openings in which to envision new forms of political organisation and spatial imagination.

This unit seeks to reimagine and redefine laziness in order to challenge principles of private property, which often remain overlooked in contemporary discussions around architecture and spatial production. We resist forms of abstraction – legal, conceptual and aesthetic – that tend to commodify land and alienate its subjects, turning spaces into assets and disintegrating communities through processes of individualisation. In so doing, our projects reveal how jurisdiction, representation and indignity can serve as productive forces in imagining new spatial relationships that evade exploitation and commodification. Architecture in this context can be seen as a device that mediates power relations, redistributes rights, negotiates forms of belonging, choreographs rituals, collectivises use and establishes forms of care and co-operation. In DIP7, we investigate architectural propositions that react to these spatio-juridical conditions marked by property regimes which perform on multiple scales. We create frames that capture, forces that trigger, lines that appropriate and lenses that make visible the conflicts between space, rights and subjects.