PROJECT SYNOPSIS

Association for Imaginary Architecture is a performance involving architectural design, narration and touch.
The performance involves a one-on-one exchange between audience participants and myself: I ask participants
to verbally describe an architectural space they have experienced. As the space is described, I draw a 'plan' of it on
the speaker's back with my hands. I have redesigned the work as multiple (3 - 5) 'seating stations' with self-instructions
where anyone can enact the roles of narrator/designer: the abilities one needs to participate are those of
narrating/listening, and touching/being touched.

 

ARTIST STATEMENT

My intention for Association for Imaginary Architecture is to offer dialogical spaces for free-association around relationships
between architecture, memory, imagination, translation, inscription and the body. I am investigating how experiences of the built world
are imagined or spatially internalized. I am considering the haptic in architectural design, touching on concepts of interface and dorsality.
Association for Imaginary Architecture references the work of Lygia Clark in her consideration of the body, space and time in understanding
relationships between objectivity and subjectivity and between creating and knowing. I am referring to Clark's Estruturacao do Self (Structuring the Self),
1976 - 1988. When I initially presented this work for the Escapist Action: Performance in Recession festival in Toronto (2009), I thought of it as a way for
participants to remember what they already possessed in terms of the material wealth of real estate or dwelling, and as an opportunity to imagine alternative
ways of dwelling. I presented it in London (2010) as part of a feminist conference on ecologies/politics relating to the built environment. As an artist doing
PhD research in architecture, I combined the 'poor' materiality of the art world (paint splattered chairs from the Slade School of Art) with design skills I
was learning at the Bartlett School of Architecture. After the conference, I designed an instruction panel, attached it to the chairs, and returned them
to the Slade, for potential use by students occupying the building in protest of the British government's proposed cuts to education.

So far the work has been used by participants in multiple ways: some describe imaginary spaces that allow us both to travel, through voice and touch,
into virtual worlds; some describe real buildings in other parts of the world that I may or may not recognize, but we both 'travel' there, nonetheless;
one had a problem with space in her workplace - after the session, she told me that my touch had helped her think through solutions to her problems;
one described the room we were actually sitting in - when the session was over, the space seemed transformed, brighter, closer to us.

 

Images: Association for Imaginary Architecture presented at the Whirlwinds/Sexuate Subjects conference, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, December, 2010.
Images 001 - 011 by Simon Kennedy; image 011 is a 5-minute exposure documenting an entire performance session. Images 012 - 015 by Joanne Bristol, documenting development
of self-instructions for the Slade.