Victoria Camblin: Monumental Luxuries

Victoria Camblin is a writer, editor, and curator of public programming. She has served as Editor and Artistic Director of the non-profit magazine and cultural platform ART PAPERS, and as Executive Editor at 032c, a Berlin based magazine and media and fashion brand. Her research and writing seek to apply historical analysis to present-day cultural phenomena as a means of exploring contemporary creative production across the disciplines of art, architecture, media, fashion, and technology. She has contributed to such publications as Pin-Up, Artforum, Art in America, Apartamento, and several international editions of GQ, in addition to numerous catalogues, books, and monographs. Camblin was a 2019 director of the Global Art Forum, a cross-disciplinary talk series and live think-tank taking place annually at Art Dubai (Dubai, UAE). She is currently 032c Editor at Large, and recently co-founded Magazine.Capital, a research and content studio run in partnership with designer, architectural historian, and writer Nicholas Korody. Their public-facing work includes "Black Hole Catalog" (2019), a manual for living with the "the new interior"—a domestic architectural metaphor for the planetary environment we inhabit today, coined just prior to the global "stay at home" mandates of 2020. Most recently, as Magazine.CapitalCamblin and Korody published "Culture Crisis: Therapies for the Confused," analyzing and providing solutions for the conflicting value systems and narratives that continue to grip the creative industrial complex. Drawing from her experience in art and fashion media, and her longstanding interest in the theories of French thinker Georges Bataille, Camblin’s work in recent months has been compelled by the notion and nature of luxury, a term, and a concept that she is keen to revise to better express the conditions of the present cultural and economic landscape.

Monumental Luxuries is an experimental lecture that considers what we mean when we talk about both “monuments” and “luxuries,” through the prism of cultural architecture. Observing the history and urban environmental footprint of buildings of art and fashion—centers and foundations commissioned from big-name architects by designer labels and conglomerates, erected to house collections in cities such as Paris and Milan —the talk proposes a redefinition of these two terms. Taking examples of such luxury industry projects as case studies, Monumental Luxuries aims to shed light on architecture’s role at the intersection of commerce, consumption, and culture today.