UOVO (Egg)

Traditionally (based on previous cognitive experience), the notion of space has been understood through a preference for architecture as form—a harsh discipline that imposes order and permanence. But space is not solely structured: it is also metabolic, digesting social functions, reconfiguring debris, hunger, failure. Drawing from Georges Bataille’s critique of architectural categorization and Simone Weil’s understanding of hunger as existential structure, Zhou explores the hunger of the ROOM—not as a passive container, but as a system of spatial digestion and disciplinary appetite.

The ROOM becomes a module, a carrier of functions that once served assimilation, naturalization, or domestication: parking lots, stations, airports; hospitals, kindergartens, prisons; cooperatives, factories, morgues.

In his final piece, Zhou builds a sculptural module of a fraternity/sorority hall—a spatial a priori of inclusion structured through the necessity of exclusion: fraternity requires a threshold of civilized violation, ritualized as pledging, where the subject enters not by right but by the act of negating himself. This initiation is not merely cultural but ontological—it is the condition of possibility for belonging, titled Uovo (Egg)—a form that withholds articulation within itself. The egg is not origin, but enclosure; not fertility, but latency. It posits structure as suspension: a sealed interior that must be fractured for meaning to emerge. In this way, the sculptural gesture is not expression, but incision—a temporal violence that suspends as form.

While architectural modules are typically perceived as spatial blueprints of clarity and utility, Uovo resists instrumentality. It is composed of post-processed matter: recycled metal from a ruined building, concrete-casted legs, and socially functional leftovers—abandoned baby strollers, geriatric walking aids. It is not a model of function, but a symbolic regurgitation of how social mechanisms metabolize structure.