Ecology of Life/Energies between things

 Outpost 180523

Wandering Lines.

Material : The Ways/Movements of Practice.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

An ecology of life, in short must be of threads and traces, not of nodes and connectors, and its subject of inquiry must consist not of the relations between organisms and their external environments, but of the relations along their severally enmeshed ways of life.

Tim Ingold.

Learning in the making.

Processual learning that occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.

A caring curiosity that wants to know,understand and explore relations.

We need to live the consequences of non-stop curiosity inside a mortal situated, relentlessly relational worlding.

Donna Harraway.

Practices that do engage in the complexities and contingencies of corporeal experiences, ie partners-with-things.

Space-Enfolding-Breath.

Inhabiting the Wall, 1992-93.

Monica Wyatt.

Monica Wyatt asks what it means to occupy architecture, not just ordinary interior spaces but also those that are inaccessible, such as a wall and its poche. Acting as a physical limit, a wall is a boundary that cannot be traversed without an opening, but the reality of a wall's thickness and the peculiar desire to be in a wall inform Wyatt's curiosity about occupying this space.

When educating architects and interior designers, the question is often resolved by expanding the wall's thickness to contain programmed space, or left behind as a space deemed unoccupied. Wyatt does not give in to either direction. Rather, she looks to the wall, entering it to find answers to these questions.

Wyatt uses poetric interpretations of poche and interior space to produce these unconventional mappings. The result is a map and a body wrapped with wallpaper, where body and wall share the same material. Wyatt finds an entry point into the wall, through a map of the body that also reinserts the body back into the wall.

Lois Weinthal, 2011.

To define a wall : What is a wall?

The questions are phenomenological and psychological, attempting to account not only for the physical presence of the wall itself but for how it is there for her.

Like Wyatt's own body, walls have fronts and backs, interiors and exteriors. They can separate and bind, and they also possess the point of view of an other from which one is viewed. For Wyatt the wall is ambiguous: even though it presents itself as a physical limit to her body, it provokes the desire to move beyond its bounds. Her confessed desire to 'get into the wall,' to escape from the physical limits of the surroundings so that she may see herself from the other side. 

Wyatt desires to be simultaneously in both places, impossible if one accepts the materialist proposition that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. She desires, however to make this possible, to conceive of a situation in which space and material become intertwined, as if consciousness and body were intertwined with in the space of a fold.

In the end Wyatt entered the wall through a logic that allows for multiple faces of consciousness. It is possible to occupy a wall only if we accept that we are present for others as well as for ourselves. By projecting ourselves into another's point of view, we construct a space within which being is defined and constituted. 

Dan Hoffman, 1994. 

The architecture and public spaces of the built environment enclose and contain. Yet the structures that confine, channel and contain are not immutable. They are ceaselessly eroded by tactical manoeuvring of inhabitants whose 'wandering lines' (de Certeau) undercut the strategic designs of societies master builders causing them gradually to wear out and disintegrate.

  

For inhabitants, however the environment comprises not the surroundings of a bounded place, but a zone in which their several pathways are thoroughly entangled. In this zone of entanglement, this meshwork of interwoven lines. There are no insides or outsides, only openings and ways through.

Up, Across and Along, Tim Ingold.

Architectural Body.

Organism-Person-Environment

Arakawa and Gins. 

Ambivalences : Hostile/Intimate Relationships.

Reclining Figures and Wall Reliefs.

There is also something of the ambivalent sensualist stirred by a mixture of passion and hostility that both caresses and abrades the surface it touches.

In the hand of Manuel Neri, Marcia Morse.1983. 

Francesca Woodman.

then at one point I did not need

Camouflage.

Neil Leach. 

St Peter Hungate.

Conceptual/Corporeal Frameworks

Visual Art Facility/Making/Curation.

As the work interacts with the body of the observer the experience mirrors these bodily sensations of the maker. Consequently, architecture is communicated from the body of the architect directly to the body of the inhabitant.

Understanding architectural scale implies the unconscious  measuring of an object or a building with one's body, and projecting one's bodily scheme on the space in question. We feel pleasure and protection when the body discovers its resonance in space.

The sense of gravity is the essence of all architectonic structures and great architecture makes us conscious of gravity and earth. Architecture strengthens verticality of our experience of the world. At the same time architecture makes us aware of the depth of earth, it makes us dream of levitation and flight.

In memorable experiences of architecture, space, matter and time fuse into one single dimension, into the basic substance of being, that penetrates the consciousness. We identify ourselves with this space, this place, this moment and these dimensions as they become ingredients of our very existence. Architecture is the art of mediation and reconciliation.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Like mothers of men, the buildings are good listeners. Long sounds, distinct or seemingly in bundles, appease the orifices of palaces that lean back gradually from canal or pavement. A long sound with its echo brings consummation to the stone.

Adrian Stokes.

Initial works made and manifested through entanglements of practice/making/place.

Slab, box, extrusions/industrial/handbuilt, flue linings, corten architectural  models.

Water/Anchorages between the sacred and the secular.

Cell-Court-Domain

Body-Water-Air

Piscina in the south wall.

Squint into the nave and tower.

Clay-Water-Fire

Five clay slab fabrications exploring intimate spaces, notion of inhabitation/anchorite within social/sacred space.

Art/Spiritual Space.

Ambivalences/Uncertainties/Paradoxes

Something Endures between The Made/Un Made.

Raw Clay Construction, lead tray, water.

The Hungate : Ambient Atmosphere/Precarious Situation/Fragile Structure and Social Relationship.

Water (secular) both corrodes/penetrates the structure, and water (sacred) caresses/comforts the soul.

White slip/emulsion paint/ yellow ochre.

Nocturnal sounds/long sounds as reminders of human solitude and mortality

Parallax.

Steven Holl.

The Eyes Of The Skin

Architecture and the Senses.

When working, both the artist and craftsman are directly engaged with their bodies and their existential experiences rather than focused on a external and objectified problem. In our imagination, the object is simultaneously held in the hand and inside the head, and the imagined and projected physical image is modelled by our bodies. We are inside and outside of the object at the same time. Creative work calls for a bodily and mental identification, empathy and compassion. A remarkable factor in the experience of enveloping spatiality, interiority and hapticity is the deliberate suppression of sharp, focused vision. 

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Figuring It Out.

The Parallel Visions Of Artists And Archaeologists.

Colin Renfrew.

Life-Class/Drawing.

The Impossible Nude.

Figural Floor Drawings.

Drawing/Wayfaring : Traces and trails over and amongst the landscape of the body.

The surface takes on a strongly sculptural sense of being moulded, modelled, abraded and yet caressed.