Outpost 291024
Space And Subjectivity.
Collage with glass and documentation from Francesca Woodman.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/
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Making/Building made indeterminate through a retention/questioning of a framework and the insertion of an event that introduces a slippage/deviation of that of a framed outcome.
Bernard Tschumi. (equation as a provisional framework)
Tentative/Processual Architectures.
Arakawa and Gins.
Lucy Orta.
Shortcomings of Phenomenological Thought.
One places oneself at the centre, designates oneself, measures oneself and uses oneself as a measure. One is in short a 'subject' and space is a projection of oneself or its counterpart, that it is defined therefore not in its own right, but in relation to the subject. Space, my space is not the context of which I constitute the 'textuality' instead it is first of all my body and then it is my body's counterpart or other, its mirror-image or shadow. It is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand and all other bodies on the other. This maintains the boundaries between body and space, subject and object.
Henri Lefebvre.
Phenomenology always stops at boundaries, at the boundary of the body, which is precisely where abject(ion) continues beyond. It is because phenomenology concerns the lived body rather than bodies in a plural and more general sense that it is a discussion of wholes rather than transitions and exchanges unable to accommodate volatile processes.
Inhabitations : Cultures Of Melting Snow.
The In-Between.
There is no room for the in-between, no way to describe exchanges between entities and the effect of those exchanges. All is static and no cannot as Francois Jullien wrote of Plato, think of the snow in the process of melting. One can only think of either snow or water, but never the process of change.
Abject(ion) Architectures of Process, with brings to the fore interrelated areas of Relational Architecture and Emergent Phenomena.
Architecture in Abjective(Abject (ion) States of Subjectivity.
Frameworks/Scaffolding.
Affective Matter/Mattering.
Kovar turns to Abjection a concept developed by Julia Kristeva, abjection-abject(ion) is both process and product, and can hold a discussion of the transgression of borders. It concerns anything that crosses the symbolic, anything that is expelled literally or figuratively, and that is necessary to keep at bay in order for subjectivity to prevail, issuing from abject(ion) is therefore a threat to our subjectivity, a threat to the boundary between Subject-Object/Body-Space.
Expanding on the processual and material nature of abject(ion), such an undertaking begins with Event and is rounded off with discussions of Affect and Matter.
Zuzana Kovar.
A Disclaimer.
Following Deleuze this book is interested in what 'Abject(ion)' does, rather than what it is.
Drawing (at times) on aspects of the same theory, Kristeva is interested in the disruption of psychological boundaries and Deleuze who deals with both psychological and physical boundaries. Through Deleuze we are able to engage with abject(ion) more holistically.
This book is not concerned with making 'abject' architecture, that is making buildings with abject matter. But is rather concerned with developing ways of thinking about bodies, spaces, and the relations within and between these through the lens of abject(ion).
Architecture in abject(ion) promotes an interest revealed by a sensibility that favours theory and textual practice over images and objects, and goes towards explaining why illustrations of examples referred to throughtout are withheld.
Project 3.1
Body aject(ion) space: A collection of contracts.
The Contracts is the collective name given to a series of projects that explore the notion of abject(ion) as event. Critically, The Contracts are not only explorations (as accommodated by Tschumi), bur also spatial events (as accommodated by Deleuze), and hence the architecture that is defined by the interplay of these events. Given the centrality to this book of the simultaneous abject(ion) of human bodies and spatial bodies, and the indiscernibility in which this results, The Contracts have come to span a period of three years, hence establishing themselves as the most developed body of work included here.
Architecture in Abjection.
Bodies-Spaces-and Their Relations.
Zuzana Kovar.
A Species of Spaces.
Reclaimations, between a desk and a skip.
Russell Coates.
Archive Mappings/Concerns : Lines/Linkages/Nodes/Points/Intersections.
Architectural Constructs/Events into Material/Making.
Abject (ion) : Affective Resonances/Matter : Clay+Ceramic.
Vessels/Voids/Making from folded spaces.
The simple issues of attending to the material.
Re-Casting Matter, not 'materials'.
Becoming mindful of 'materials' and their 'hylomorphic tendencies'.
Clay retains transitions and exchanges, collects up discrete entities/symbols/inscriptions, places them into volatile spaces/processes of change .
Questioning Subjectivity : Fluidity of matter/material out of place.
The Cinema of Catherine Breillat.
The Process of Abject(ion).
In critical theory, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts. Julia Kristeva explored an influential and formative overview of the concept in her 1980 work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, where she describes subjective horror (abjection) as the feeling when an individual experiences or is confronted by the sheer experience of what Kristeva calls one's typically repressed "corporeal reality", or an intrusion of the Real in the Symbolic Order.
The process of a body excreting from within itself. A transition between inside and outside, a disruption of physical and psychological boundaries of the still prevalent understanding of body as subject and space as object.
A moment of indiscernibility, the result of which is the product of repulsion, the abject and where body, space and abject become an ambiguity, ranging in intensity from subtle gestures to confronting actions immersed in the viscosity of our leaky bodies.
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