http://www.spacing.org/index.html
http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/events/conferences/conferences.htm
'Abstract Tours / The Poetics of Urban Inscription: Abstract Dérives as Rhetorical Strategy'
This paper takes as point of departure my "Abstract Tours" project, started in 1997 in Berlin, and its subsequent adaptations. My intention is to investigate the critical potential of this project as an instrument of phenomenological knowledge and a conduit for a multiplicity of urban representations - ranging from the poetical to the political. Inscribere ('Inscribe') and Describere ('Describe') point to the common origin of the act of 'writing' Scribere and 'drawing' Disegnare (the linguistic cognate of 'design'). Is drawing a line on the map and following it 'on the ground' a form of design? Is the recasting of space through the dyad walking-writing, as de Certeau suggested, a form of architecture? Can the spatial dimension of writing open up both the unconscious and historical memory of the city?
Berlin 1997
For a month, I operated a 'tour agency' from a Portakabin placed in Schlossplatz, next to the Stadtforum, where projects for the corporate reshaping of the German capital were exhibited to the public. These tours took their form from random geometric figures that participants were invited to draw on a map of Berlin with the help of Perspex stencils. Those embarking on a tour tried to "stick to the line" as far as possible, which often entailed jumping over fences, trespassing, climbing over walls, crossing railway lines etc. The gesture of drawing a geometrical pattern on the map mimicked the conceptual abstractions that inform the configuration of spatial practices, such as architecture and city planning, the design of routes, the schematic grid of property lines and ultimately, the construction of the Berlin Wall. Gordon Matta-Clark's work can be regarded as the closest reference for Abstract Tours - his cuts through buildings revealed the constructional imposition, one could actually penetrate the facades and read general schematic structures. My project evolved around the question of whether it was possible to socialize that practice by inviting people to cut through their city and read how physical and spatial contexts, socially-constructed boundaries, and architectural representations intervene in processes of production and reproduction. By following the lines traced on paper, rather than realizing them on the ground with a wrecking ball and reinforced concrete, abstract tourism aimed to expose the code, rather than imitate it, an inverse, rather than a symmetrical practice. The closing exhibition, held in the Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, included all participants who had documented their urban explorations by taking photographs, making videos, audio-recordings, collecting found objects, keeping journals etc. The polyphony of voices and redistribution of representational authority raised both political and epistemological questions about 'who' is authorized to "represent the city". 'The chorus of idle steps' fragmented totalizing representations of the city, and opened up a plurality of perspectives, which in turn produced provisional, transient, partial perceptions and representations. Once these representations were assembled, the spaces of the city were incorporated into something closer to a fictional narrative than an objective record.
Hong Kong 2004
Representations are means by which the city is known, analyzed and controlled: ideology and knowledge become barely distinguishable once they are subsumed under the broader notion of representation. The languages in which the city is taken to be known - the languages of economics, sociology, statistics, surveys, case studies, demographics, cartography, photography, empirical documentation, etc. - are languages not only for describing the city, but languages embedded in the techniques and technologies of disciplinarity. Abstract Tours in Hong Kong are offered through a website. Instead of geometrical shapes, here I propose rhetorical strategies including tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony, figures of speech which construct meaning by transferring or deferring it from the realm of familiar experience into the realm of the unfamiliar. Not only do they become the form in which (partial) knowledge of the city is conveyed, but also as cognitive tools, they produce fresh perceptions and insights. The fabric of the city becomes a 'material' from which a new syntax of sites is created. The resulting narrative is collective and finds its way back into the electronic forum set up for this purpose.
Biography
Laura Ruggeri, Dottore in Semiotica (University of Bologna, Italy)
MA Spatial Culture (Middlesex University, UK)
Born in Milan, since 1997 she has been living in Hong Kong where she teaches Aesthetics and Semantics of Product Design, and Research Methods for Designers in the MA Design program at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Her academic work, critical analysis and research interests converge with her art practice. For the past ten years she has been realizing videos, installations, and urban scale art projects across Europe, investigating the relationship between body and architecture and promoting attention to meaning construction and its articulations. Co-curator of a film retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark in Milan, panelist at the 1997 Film+Arch festival in Graz, and artist-in-residence at the Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, reviews of her projects have featured in Artforum, Flash Art, TAZ, Tema Celeste, Art Monthly, Die Presse.
She has published in Wiley Academy Architectural Design, Interni, Journal of Mundane Behavior, Circa, Nummer, Springer, Opening, Flash Art International and has contributed essays to 'Here, There, Elsewhere: Dialogues on Location and Mobility', London: Open Editions, 2001, 'Geografie del Lontano Vicino', Turin: Masoero, 2000, 'Hier, Da und Dort', Darmstadt: Häusser-Media, 2000, 'HK Lab', Map Book Publishers: Hong Kong 2002. She is the editor of 'HK Lab2' (forthcoming).
Posted by walkinginplace at January 20, 2005 02:13 AM