Outpost 091123
Situated Practice Live.
Critical Spatial Practices.
The conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event.
Making/Living in the matrices of situatedness.
Seated nude, 1958 Oil 116x89cm.
Alberto Giacometti devoted much of his career to the struggle between matter and meaning, engaging in an extended exploration of how to reduce the figures's mass as far as possible while imbuing it with essential force. Up until his death in 1966, Giacometti pushed the limits of representation, setting into motion ever-unfolding phenomenological investigations that remain at the core of art making today.
How can matter-bronze, plaster, charcoal, paint-embody truth? And how, if at all, can art preserve the essence of the living?
Nothing disappears completely.
In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows. Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.
Production of Space.
Henri Lefebvre. 1991
Spatiality-Space and the Object.
Of or relating to space, existing or occurring in space, having extension in space.
The Multiplicities and heterogeneous nature of space and spatiality.
Abstract and concrete, produced and producing, imagined and materialized, structured and lived, relational, relative and absolute.
Concetto Spaziale, Lucio Fontana.
The protean nature of space and its ability to bring the unconscious into the open.
Merleau-Ponty.
Lived Body and Space.
Situatedness and Place, multdisciplinary perspectives on spatio-temporal contingency in human life.
Hunefeldt/Schlitte. 2018
Sites, Situations and other kinds of Situatedness.
Fields of Care.
Interactions between bodies and our habitats.
What is outside eventually comes inside.
The irreducible fact of the human condition is that we are open. The bodies we house are open bodies, dependent on interchange and communion with surrounding life. Surfaces are two-sided like the skin, we cannot touch without being touched in return, and because we are open , we need boundaries strong and flexible enough to also close. Complementarily and interdependence belong to this openness.
Architecture is a Verb.
Sarah Robinson. 2022
The associated verb to situate describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective situated defines something's site or situation.
The way we inhabit our everyday spaces, reveals the extent to which our bodies extend into and integrate with the features of our surrounding.
The Architectural Body.
Organism/Person/Environment.
Arakawa and Gins.
Making, is a question of surrendering to the wood, then following it where it leads, instead of imposing a form upon a matter. Matter so shaped informs the processes of its shaping.
Deleuze and Guattari.
Making is not a matter of imposition or a hylomorphic process. But of intervening in the fields of force and flows of material. What this understanding entails is that rather than interpreting the creative process 'backwards' from a finished object to an idea in the mind of an agent, one must rather 'read it forwards' in an ongoing generative movement, that is once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic.
Sarah Robinson, Tim Ingold.
The mutual shaping of body and place is captured in the Greek word Choros. The root of choreography referred not only to dance, but also to the dancing place, and the group that dances.
Chora, closer to the meaning that Suzanne Langer articulates is the space of forces, a generative place that depends on participation, a territory that appears through continual remaking and reweaving.
Topos, like its modern usage in topography suggests, was space that can be mapped.
Notion of a Place-Ballet.
The 'Spanish Steps' are not only crystallisations of movement, but generators of movement. We can navigate our living spaces in the dark, because we have already integrated the locations of our furnishings into our repertoire of movement. We create a zone of familiarity, with its integrated gestures, behaviours and actions that sustains a particular task or aim.
The reciprocity between one's body-routine and the environment supports these integrated movements, resulting in a fusion of interpersonal and communal exchange and effective attachment.
Places/Public Spaces become meaningful because they support our personal body-routines in an inter personal setting.
David Seaman.
Place-Ballet, propositional movements of dancers around objects and the exhibition space.
10 Days in The Laundry, Winchester. 2009
Bodies/Interchange/Communion with Surrounding Life.
Breathing, a balancing act of sustaining openness.
There really is an inhalation and an exhalation of being.
We not only breathe in and out, we breathe in a certain rhythm, our heart beats in rhythm, our perceptual experience oscillates in rhythms. Our experience of colour once again lays bare the facts of this unending rhythm.
We speak of 'inspiration' and the word should be taken literally. There really is an inspiration and expiration of being.
My flat is, for me, not a set of closely associated images. It remains a familiar domain round about me only as I still have 'in my legs' the main distances and directions involved, and as long as from my body intentional threads run out towards it.
Phenomenology of Perception.
Merleau-Ponty.
If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time.
Practitioners and theorists whose work overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond.
Practices that incorporate, event scores, insertions, even banalities, and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation as well as duration.
Projects located between Art and Architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operate. Such projects operate at a triple crossroads, between theory and practice, between art and architecture, between public and private, Jane Rendell is keen to stress three particular qualities of these works, the critical, the spatial, and the interdisciplinary.
Situatedness then is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or/and being situated.
Outpost 090222
Architectural Body/Procedural Architecture
Organism/Person/Environment
Earth, House, Hold, Dwelling Places.
Unlike the sense of sight or hearing, only the sense of touch can discern space and time at once.
The skin as the harbourer of a subjects sense of touch.
Skin/Subjectivity becomes as flesh a connective tissue which both unites and divides.
The skin can judge time less well than the ear, and space less well than the eye, but it is skin alone that combines the spatial and temporal dimensions.
Maternal Skin/Subject Formation, Anzieu.
A Field in England : On the nature of Photography.
Between Art and Information.
Brought to Light : Photography and the Invisible.
The Visible/Invisibility between the potential of things.
The Photograph and The Lacanian Mirror.
In which identity is constantly shored up and broken down, but also as a persistent space invested with the paradoxical qualities of intimacy and alienation, of proximity and utter detachment all through which an offer of an encounter is held out in invitation.
Inter-Subjective Encounters, a space in which the subjectivities of the artist and the spectator might meet and mingle.
The skin is the surface through which self and other are mediated.
The mutuality of touch itself is echoed by the skins structure, it both touches and is touched and this duality is reflected in the way the skins surface is exposed to the outside world, whilst also protecting and containing the unseen interiority of the body.
Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.
Light and Spaces of Intersubjectivity.
Tactile Light.
The photograph holds out the promise of an encounter through its carnal medium.
For Riches, the self-representational photograph becomes a kind of veil or mask, a displaced surface whose skin-like relationship to the subject is always suspended, and perpetually deferred. It frames a space of contact and a fantasy of union with the original subject, the photograph's skin-like quality also enables it to be imagined as an inter-subjective space of exchange.
Light creates the spatiality/transitions that passes beyond subject/object relationships.
Skin/Surface/Subjectivity : Movements in thinking through Spatial Agency
Skin becomes a site of symbolic acts of aggression/gesture.
Surfaces of suggested pain/experience through which subjectivity is created.
Conduits of colour specificities and counterpoints
Relationscapes : Movements, created through colour temperature and spatial contact.
The phenomena of things being brought into perception/focus.
Through a body every colour creates movement and has its own/creates its own perspective/its mapping/layering/extension of spatial temporal material.
Analogies/Difference : Spaces created through mimesis, wavelengths intermingling with the spatial.
Glass/Lead/Filtered Light.
Glass Slide/Subjectivities brought into the light
Colour Subjectivities, the appearance/experience of mattering material.
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