1/17/2024 0 Comments Inpaint for ipod instalIn this essay Eisenstein hails Piranesi’s visionary architectural drawings as creating the rupture point from which modern architecture exploded. The film employs a text from Sergei Eisenstein’s Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Forms (1964). The final work in the exhibition, Piranesi Sense, is a film-sentence-collage. Scales are skewed and perspective is ruptured. The duality of the two horizontal surfaces (ceiling and film) facing one another creates an important relationship: two architectures laid bare, two spaces transposed onto a third. Outdoor sounds can be identified, voices of passers by and traffic. The short, looped film Gestalt Narrative shows a floor cloth cut into the form of a generic floor plan and placed onto a pebbled path. The piece acts to lower the ceiling within the basement, emphasising the hermetic and intimate nature of the architecture. Woven Architecture translates this liminal materiality into practice. This form of mimesis connects directly to bekleidung: both creating a form of exterior masking, both concealing what lies beneath. The second is the distressing psychological manifestation identified in schizophrenics, who claim to know where they are but feel unable to locate themselves in that place. The first is the material manifestation of the spider crab, which camouflages itself with its environment, using the materials it finds on the seabed. Caillois gives two examples of a breakdown in the distinction between body and space through mimetic behavior one embodied, the other disembodied. This liminality reoccurs within Caillois’ writing, however here it is located instead within a psychological understanding of space. The potential of this liminal form of materiality as both a state and a form is explored in all of the works within breaking A skin, weaving A sense. As a result, Semper’s bekleidung actually produces a curious liminal form of architectural materiality – neither soft nor hard. However, within Semper’s examples, the soft, flowing forms of textile are also denied by being rendered solid in paint or stucco. It was crucial for Semper that the bekleidung should mask the solidity hiding beneath, resulting in the materiality of a building being denied. He termed this treatment of a building ‘bekleidung’, meaning ‘covering’ or ‘dressing’ in German. Semper believed that even when solid materials such as brick and stone were introduced to architectural structures, the textile forms of weave and drapery should still be evident: celebrated on the outside of a building through stucco or paint. James’ use of textiles has been influenced by Semper’s theory of textile being the origin of architecture and the essence of building. At Cole, a choreography of space and sound leads the body from habitat to habitat. James works with textiles and ‘soft’ materials to create a temporal form of architecture: one that moves, reacts to bodies and creates both a transparency and opaqueness. Each of these thinkers have been used to build a methodology that examines the break down of a distinction between body and space.Ĭrab Bekleidung, the sculptural and auditory installation that meets the viewer on entering the space, is influenced by the writings of both Caillois and Semper. These moments have developed from research into several key figures from architectural and psychological theory: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a 17th century architectural artist, Gottfried Semper, an 18th century architect and theorist and Roger Caillois, a 20th century theorist. Within each work in the exhibition a moment of discord can be recognised. Through these points of rupture a new sensory rationale is established: where forms of chaos take over from order, where logical thought is forsaken for twisted reason and where psychological disruptions are expanded into material forms to be inhabited and embodied by the viewer. Moments of discord are of particular interest where normal service has been interrupted and we find ourselves within a moment of rupture. The works reference architecture and its affects how we encounter, react, absorb, camouflage and rupture from these physical structures, and the emotional and psychological responses this causes. I am in my body but other times I break my skin and pass to the other side Sometimes I can locate myself and others not. The difference between me and it ebbs and flows. Breaking A skin, weaving A sense brings together a collection of works which examine the psychological distinctions between body and space.
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