First read at a listening session organised by Pressing Private Buttons and hosted by Well Read in Lisbon, this essay traces the afterlife of a strange impression encountered somewhere in Algés. Through pliable images, a sick body, and disintegrating structures, it reflects on the uneasy relationships between vulnerability, perception, and corporeal decay.

Our objective should not be to renounce matter but rather to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called — architecture, gardens, computer technology — is not important. Until a new name is given to that form, I will call it the ‘anti-object’.
Kengo Kuma, Anti-Object

It was a Friday night in November, when B summoned an image that would come to form the architecture of a strange fixation. During the summer, I had submitted myself to a regimen of daily suppositories, religiously inserting them in the hope of appeasing my inflamed colon. Echoing these private rituals of alleviation, the image of the Zetpil Church (Zetpil being the Dutch word for suppository) took shape as we drove the winding roads of Algés, catching a glimpse of the Santíssima Trindade Church out the passenger window. Observing its tapered exterior from inside the car, B recalled that in the aftermath of its erection, someone had dubbed the church for its resemblance to the gelatinous projectile that one inserts into the vaginal or anal cavity. Without ceremony we drove past the church. The afterimage of this improbable architecture lodged in my mind, like a stubborn desire for a building that might soften and liquefy.

An afterimage is already a rehearsal of dissolution. During the retinal lag in vision, perception slides from solid to spectral as thing turns to trace, divulging an effort to retain form even as the original slips irretrievably away. Against this drift, solidity and stability mark the cornerstones of architectural intent, weighing it down through a material grammar of concrete and steel. Such aspiration for permanence is not simply a question of technical properties ensuring the structural integrity of architectural objects, but also marks an ideological commitment to yield forms that endure, for structures capable of withstanding the test of time. As an imaginary structure whose efficacy depends not on profane vulgarity but ontological subversion, the Zetpil Church however insists on a different model of continuity. Where conventional architecture aspires to stabilise the world through formal presence, the Zetpil Church envisions a structure closer to the afterimage itself. Here, the status of the object is contingent, porous, and pliable—an edifice that looks metabolisable, as if one could deform it with the force of a fingertip.

To point toward dissolution is therefore not an announcement of destruction but rather a sensing of the threshold at which forms begin to loosen their edges. Slipping between the monumentality dominating classical architecture and the object-obsession fuelling the modernist objective, the German architect Bruno Taut imagined architectural forms that were instead aligned with collectivist sensibilities, privileging experience over discrete forms. Yet Taut’s relative indifference to the emerging power of media—and the limiting optics of monochromatic photography embedded within it—left his architecture at odds with a modernity increasingly shaped by images. As architecture became inseparable from its photographic counterpart, buildings were produced as legible, self-contained objects primed for mass-dissemination. Underpinning the ‘anti-object’ tendered by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma is thus an architectural dissolution, which can be read in part through Taut's renouncement of architectural objects and their presumed autonomy from perception. In troubling the pursuit of modern architecture to assert itself as unmistakable figures against environments, the anti-object seek the quiet dispersal of such ascendancy, and rather than consolidating form into autonomous and monumental figures, the anti-object disperses it, not as a simple refusal of matter, but as the more difficult proposition to resist the default of objecthood itself.

With its ovoid silhouette, the suppository too appears as a smooth and self-contained object. However, as an object that depends on its own cessation, the suppository must be absorbed in order to successfully perform. This dialectics, which also form the crux of the Zetpil Church, immediately unsettles the monumentality that bolsters modern architecture as a device of material rigidity, by offering dissolution not as the failure of structure but rather the condition of its efficacy. Dissolution here acts less as the material negation of architecture with the aim of undermining the necessity for durable structures, than an ideological recalibration of the architectural fetish for monumental objects. Where the monument seeks glory through endurance—through structures that pledge divine perpetuity—, the Zetpil Church proposes a different metaphysics as an architecture whose sanctity lies in its capacity to vanish. If the traditional church—as with architecture in general—asks for reverence through solidity, a queer architecture of dissolution offers acclaim through the softening of boundaries. Like the sick body, the Zetpil Church awards little reassurance as its boundaries are quietly relinquished, giving way to something less easily held in place. The afterimage returns here with force. Much like how the afterimage lingers beyond the event that produces it, the Zetpil Church envisions architectures and bodies as sites of mutual construction and collapse, where potency emerges not from the endurance of form but from the capacity of forms to pass into other states.

Dissolution, then, is not irreverence or annihilation but rather the ability to render form vulnerable. The Zetpil Church—and by extension the secular architectures it conjures—offers, perhaps most importantly then, an image that troubles the moral hierarchy between sacred and profane. Within cultural and religious imaginaries of the body, the anus occupies a peculiar position. Where the mouth may be sanctified through prayer, the anus is disavowed as the abject, as something turned away from, kept out of sight and outside the framework of the sacred body. And yet it is precisely this exclusion from representations of piety that grants it disruptive force. Where the sacred seeks the purification of boundaries, of thresholds kept clean and intact, the anal orifice instead insists on passage as a site where matter passes through. This slippage undoes the fantasy of the sealed body, suggesting instead that what is taken as divine order is in fact an attempt to close and contain—imposing stable form on a body that is otherwise always in flux, always becoming and unbecoming. In this sense, the anus collapses the distinction between profane and sacred, not by contaminating the latter, but by revealing the instability of the distinction itself. To turn attention to the anus is to refute the moral ordering that privileges what can be displayed, spoken, and ritualised. Such ‘profanity' does more than unsettle monumentality. It redraws a social imagination of vulnerability, where the sacred is never sealed off from the profane but constituted through a refiguring of purity. The result is an architectural condition that resembles the afterimage: neither fully formed nor fully absent, but a pliable impression that lingers, dissolving into what surrounds it.

The private bodily routines of palliation have a way of migrating into the realm of perception. As I revisit this image I first encountered when journeying the outskirts of Lisbon, I am reminded of the attention of that moment. The church’s robust silhouette collapsed in the flash of metaphor, leaving in its wake only a puddle of brick and mortar. What remains of the Zetpil Church is neither fully object nor fully idea, but a residue of perception—a pliable impression that drifts in the mind after the corporeal event has passed. The puddle, so literal in its composition, lingers, not as permanence but as possibility to inhabit the threshold between form and dissolution. To frame the Zetpil Church as desecration would be misleading then. No longer oriented toward dogma, the architecture turns instead toward the vernacular of vulnerability, aiming not to scandalise the sacred but to redeem the disavowed.