What happens in an architecture exhibition? What, and who is it for? What does it do, and how does it do it? Solicited: Proposals is a shared effort to parse the architecture exhibition, to untangle and rethink its meaning and its potential for today. Through the lens of a single element, each contribution seeks to reimagine the architecture exhibition: what it allows for and does not allow for; what it enables, what it disables; what it constructs and deconstructs. Solicited: Proposals is a project initiated by ArkDes and e-flux Architecture.

“The Budget” is an essay on the politics, poetics, and pragmatics of exhibition budgets.

“The exhibition budget is rarely treated or interpreted as a possible site of critical inquiry. Instead, budgets are seen as lowly documents, an administrative consequence or a bureaucratic necessity full of constraints, grievances, and limitations. Yet my experience has taught me to read exhibition budgets as discursive sites of production, full of meaning, value systems, and decision points. The exhibition budget works, and in its workings, it can produce and reproduce social and political effects.”