Bodies and Architectural Space, Collage

The following series of collages and excerpts of writing were created during a period of research regarding theories of bodies in relationship to architectural space. The process culminates in the work Body:Wall_Encounters as published in Island Island.

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“The first gesture of art, its metaphysical condition and universal expression, is the construction or fabrication of the frame…It is the frame that establishes territory out of the chaos that is the earth…the frame’s most elementary form is the partition, whether wall or screen, that, projected downward, generates the smoothness of a floor, that “rarefies” and smooths over the surface of the earth, creating a first (human) territorialization.”[1]

[1] Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory & Art: Deleusze and the Framing of the Earth

What choices do we have in this framing? What ideas are enforced through our observation of bodies in particular spaces? Are we conscious of the confluence of subtle architectural intonations intra-acting with our agency?

Situating Body in spatial context, articulating our proportion in relation to the ‘‘gesture’ of everyday buildings’[1], we are in a reflexive process of dialogue with our own sensibility of who/what we are at a moment in time, open to suggestion from Wall, like archway and sidewalk, as to our framing. Through this ‘machinery of connection’, the Body reconciles matter and space, engaging in a profound continuum of emergent sensorial knowledges [2].

[1] Beyond Building: Architecture through the human body, Mohd. Shahrudin Abd. Manana,* and Chris L. Smith, in Alam Cipta Volume 5 (1), Department of Architecture, Faculty of Design and Architecture, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang Selangor, Malaysia, June 2012

[2] Smith & Daly

Evolutions and lethargies of economies, histories and ideologies of politics, are refracted in concrete and fabrication, the reverberations of which situate us within the story of the time and place we occupy. And we ‘speak’ back, assuming patterns of congregation and individuality as silhouetted against this backdrop, favouring the suggestions of ledges and passageways, adhering to symbiotic planes that fundamentally underlie our ability to co-exist.