presentation manuscript
1.
In this specific context, I view gifting, presenting a gift, as an altruistic exchange. A gift is presented because of various reasons, it can be an act of kindness, a thank you or a celebration. It can also be part of politics, acts of politeness, an apology or as a routine ritual.
Marcel Mauss argues in his essay 'The Gift.” that gifting involves an exchange. I believe gifting can embody altruism while still fostering stronger bonds between giver and recipient. In my case, the gift is an addition of something, an excessiveness that would not have been required otherwise. It is the materialisation of a relationship between two.
The gift should not imply that the recipient is inadequate or requires improvement.
I prefer gifts that fulfil desires rather than immediate needs. In regards to the current context, gifting represents an abundance of care. Helping is something you should do, gifting is something you could do.
And gifting becomes an experiment; you can not reveal what you are gifting until the recipient is receiving it, and here you become an observer, analysing the reaction resulting from the act. In this case, the goal is an exchange of positive emotion, the recipient acquires something beyond payment, and the giver gains a feeling of accomplishment, having thought, prepared and materialised something in the world of another. In this case, it brings balance.
It is the thought that counts.
2.
Today I have spent 108 days with a house to be demolished. It is situated 7 kilometres south of Roskilde, Denmark. It is a residential house that is one and a half stories tall, it connects to a barn and an old bar and lounge area. It has stood empty for at least ten years and it doesn't seem to be anything in particular, it wouldn't cause any special reaction and it would not cross your mind if you passed by. It just exists.
This project has its roots in the interest of exploring: what are the social, physical and thought processes around a house to be demolished? And how does documentation intertwine with architecture? And lastly Can I become one with a house?
By inserting myself in the timeline of a house most people would pass by, And through documentation in various ways, I have aimed to make architecture into a verb. During this process the questions that have floated around have been more open and leading.
These questions have been about understanding what existing architecture is? What does it mean to exist? What is a house? How do we relate to space, house, architecture?
3.
By putting my body into the space and narrative of a house that is going to be demolished I created a new chapter of the story which is this house. From the beginning the house forms the narrative, it exists, it makes space, rhythm and frames and together with me it shapes a non linear narrative of spatial sequence and understanding.
By letting vision guide the process I set up points in the house which I mapped and measured. These experiments created a choreography of the body in space. As I moved around in the building at this time, I started to read strings as direction and a solidified relation.
4.
After having come back to Lund with these thoughts I longed to further investigate what this built configuration was. I let it inspire a fragmented replica building, consisting of these relations.
By building, my body became a mediator of the experience and memory of the existing house. By the act of building I had this strong reflection of the likeness of building and un-building. Hence I made a list with everything that was architecture at that moment, or the result of the creation of it.
5.
The fragments become allegory, and play with the notion of being the house, in a completely different place. The fragmented pieces of existing space let one feel, think and construct own understandings and experiences of the house. It also lets you play with the notion of site-non site, becoming a laboratory of a house in Roskilde, but in the “full scale lab” in Lund.
6.
By inviting people to different activities in the house I could celebrate it. The feeling of anticipation, action and ruin, what was left after the events, also became very clear, and shared a resemblance to how the house in Roskilde was perceived.
It becomes an experience of space and place, the house in Roskilde becomes meaningful space, place, through its activation in Lund. The architecture created the social, but the social also created the architecture.
7.
After the activity the time had come, the full scale lab house became unwanted and reduced to physical material in the way of something, and has since been in a state of displacement, it had no room, and shared the same unwantedness in the norms of the institution in search of apparent and logical function.
8.
The act of removing in order to create is sometimes distant for us.
But by cutting, the existence of the house becomes apparent. By creating a void we start to think, and engage with the house in a different way than we would if we had not made these cuts, then it would be just a house passed by. It is another play with the seen and unseen.
Somehow the act creates multiple materials that cite the house. It creates new memories which connect and grow out of the memory of the existing house. It materialises and uses the bodily ritual to carve space and narrative. By putting my body to work, I started understanding, at least my own take, of what Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts achieve beyond sculptural value.
Through my body in the space, this act also became a way for the two houses to connect. It felt good being at the house and working in similar ways to building the house in Lund. It created a balance between here and there.
Lastly, the acts of me and others made me reflect on what the function of existing architecture is and can be other than a house. This house has become a laboratory, a space to harvest, a social space, a house to dwell in your mind, a house to speak about and think about.
9.
As a result of these rituals, pieces from the house in Roskilde were displaced. It was a good moment to see the house from the full scale lab and a house from Roskilde come together. They became displaced together, object, trash, item became artefact, and in my mind, full of potential.
10.
After these fast actions and retrievals I had got into a state of reflection and organisation. It had become apparent that material not only means physical things, but thoughts, ideas and memories, which can be sorted, grouped and assembled in ways that intrigue and leave room for thoughts, discussions and imagination.
It is this material that constructs a house. And through sorting and organising and assembling the artefacts I become more connected to the house in Roskilde.
11.
As a w esterner and an architect I am questionably accustomed to the grid as a way to create a coordinate system, something I did to get a fixed set of relations for exploring the objects.
By creating a grid in a room you start reading its imperfections, creating points of relation within a void, making visible what makes the room. I find it humorous how the common idea of a static coordinate system meets the human body constructing it, ending with a non static, human, grid. I think it is comparable to our obsession to force our grids onto everything, yet our reality is far from it.
Similarly to Peter Smithson, I use the original site to generate a new site, a non-site. This becomes an act of place-making, materialising, rituals in new contexts to make space into place. The artefact becomes part of a new system and a new totality. One artefact is the original, another is the replica, connected through the ritual, one artefact's void relates to another one's extension. Multiple layers of relations start playing into the experience, story and history that make the artefacts relate to each other. The void around them allows for a mental game where the story unfolds and at the same time they also cite their origin, making us read multiple stories at the same time, fixed into physical matter.
As a result of configuration and ritual, my prejudice towards the house had completely changed. When first visiting the house it felt as an uncomfortable intimacy, however when walking in this configuration now, I instead became scared of touching the objects, in fear of destroying them instead.
12.
Between thought, drawing and house, the body acts. In a dance with the house a story unfolds.
As thoughts started to synthesise while spending time setting up and making the House-Objects exhibition I got an urge to analyse the layers of space, the existing fragments of material stories, at the same time I wanted to create theatrical compositions that trigger your mind to fill the gap, becoming storytelling through relation, material and space.
Architecture is often held high and mostly regarded for its solid and static qualities. The reality of existing is however very different, when experienced in real time as a built reality. Architecture creates theatrical qualities by constructing visions, sequences and visual layers that we experience as a totality with our moving or static bodies.
13.
This body of work has amounted to a substantial amount of material. At the time of writing, the project contains about 24 hours of unedited video, over 2000 edited photographs, reflections, notes, sketches, collages, ideas, over 140 artefacts, fragments of full scale reproductions of the house. This material is the result of spending time with a house. It is the by-product of ritual. Documentation is art-making, art-making is documentation.
One could call this an archive. The notion of the archive however offers a temporal dilemma, generally it orders and sorts material in categorised folders to be fixed in a linear time frame.
Finally the house could come out of its confinement. If the basement is the graveyard that is the traditional archive, this project has become an archive as a movement. As something that can appear, disappear, create, merge and generate new ideas and understandings.
The house is completely different from what it was 108 days ago. It operates as a harbinger of ideas, something that inspires. The ritual, displacement, study and documentation have created connectors to a before smooth surface, allowing multiple further stories to be told and generated from out of the house.