Passages nomades
Passages nomades was a transdisciplinary improvisation-performance-event scheduled to take place in October 2020 but was interrupted by a Covid-19 lockdown. Various artists, musician, dancer and the south-west winds were to co-compose with line-surfaces as the sun set. The fifteen feet Ripstop fabric strips that comprise the line-surfaces1 were strung across the space and interconnected with elastic chords in such a way that the movement of one strip affected the movement of another. Dancer and musician were to enter the site and attune to the quality of energy and forces, while interacting with the strips sonorously, visually and physically as two video artists filmed the event from various perspectives. The performance was also open to spectators from the alley below.
The participants were prompted to become line or line-like, to feel the sounding/resounding, smells, colouring; to respond to the changing winds, vibrations, light; to engage in a an unfolding and infolding movement-with the rhythm of the interval; inhabiting and architecting space, expanding and contracting the felt immediacy and potential of line collectively generating and generated with its morphing diagrams.
When the performance was cancelled I decided to leave the banner-lines in place on the large west facing terrace and to document their interaction with the passing seasons, changing weather and their effect on my perception of 'atmospheric' time. Their omnipresent yet constantly changing dynamic presence (through the glass doors) has become an important affective factor in my daily life, especially in these times of Covid lockdown.
This direct link with the dynamic landscape heightened my awareness and connection with the live constantly transforming environment, making me realize that nothing (not even space) is without movement. The banners began to be perceived as 'slices' through space and time that capture and make visible ephemeral, already-changing atmospheric instants on their surfaces. Their white synthetic materiality contrast and accentuate along their edges, the space against which they appear. In their constant reframing of space I became aware of the permeability of the world; spaces created between the surfaces, overlapping, interconnecting and interpenetrating completely changed my rapport with the familiar space and with time. Each takes on a life of it own (depending on its orientation, position, fabric, and links to the others and to the architecture), while simultaneously participating in the collective assemblage. The assemblage has become over time, at once the expression or embodiment of the breath (or one might say the 'flesh') of the world and of the very potentiality of drawing.
Videos: October Afternoon
When the performance Passages nomades was cancelled I decided to leave the banner-lines in place and to document their interaction with the passing seasons, changing weather and their effect on my perception of 'atmospheric' time. Their omnipresent yet constantly changing dynamic presence (through the glass doors) has become an important affective factor in our daily lives, especially in these times of Covid lockdown.
Pedagagical Translations
This project emerged as a means of making visible the dynamic interconnectedness of body-surrounds in terms of drawing and in response to mostly disembodied views of students' depictions of architecture. 'To draw architecture, environment and body as extensions of each other.'
Architects must admit to time. They need to get coeval, to share the time of others, and maybe the best way to start is to look out the window at le temps, at the waether as a reminder of the immediacy, multiplicity, interconnectedness, and power of time.
Jeremy Till
.A-Sketch: Architecting Elasticity
Drawing is of the string or fiber, frayed into a thousand strands (a line is always proliferating) that generates surfaces: dermic membranes permeating the body and responding to its movements and vibrations; an imminent resounding of corporeal and cosmic forces that like the sonorous, contracts and dilates, appears and fades back into itself, but not before it re-emits these forces back into the surface endowing it with its own vitality: coupling forces to propel and intensify the felt qualitativeness of experience.
Play the strings, stroke the surfaces, transduce them into intensive forces so that they fuse into an architectural surrounds; every-body will be architecting time, splicing, splaying sp(l)ace. Sp(l)ace will take on the amorphous timbre of a collective movement endlessly variable in speed, force, direction, rhythm and relations, re-sounding it back in the body.
Could this elasticity operate as a medium in which worldings and resonances form _in thinking-feeling-doing_ like fog or fumes rather than matter-proper; a line infinitely permeable and extendible while maintaining its resilience?
Pull on its fibers’ ends and wrap them around your body, winding them into a sort of Mobius spring; bounce, swing over to your neighbors, hitching bodies on the way. You may even hitch a stone, a bird or an earthworm if you’re lucky. Feel the resonances co-mingling, re-sounding with your architectural surrounds. Now hop on your amphibious skateboard and ride the tidal surges as line reels you in and out; see what happens: nothing but your own energy unraveling, co-composing with others and reverberated back to you through the in-corporeality of the line.
Timeless sp(l)aces will appear in moments of stillness when your body impacts the elastic trajectories of/between others: when your own invested forces or efforts catch up with you and join with those of other bodies, transforming you in the process and forming another impetus: a somatic anacrusis.
These elastic lines are not really lines or surfaces anymore since they are constantly appearing and dispersing as a resonance of a world on the move. In fact they are more akin to mist formations, or anamorphous deformations, molecular becomings. Many ethereal atomizations and micro-event-particles consonating, each its own center of force in consonant formation; the line is only the binding medium or transverse wave in/from which they travel.