Fine Arts and Music Collected Works - Theses
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ItemMaking and sharing space: experiments with body, clothing and architecture( 2020)Making and Sharing Space: Experiments with Body, Clothing and Architecture investigates spatial situations generated by installations that test the optical relationship between the three ‘skins’: the body, clothes and architecture. As practice-led research, the resulting creations of the artistic practice are treated as experiments and consequently called ‘art-experiments’. The base of the art-experiments are participatory spatial installations that focus on the dressed, sensing body in movement. In the experimental set-up, the bodies, clothes and architecture are used as constructive elements to explore the three-skin relationship. The findings are the result of a collaboration between the researcher, the participants who visited the work, and the artworks themselves. The researcher is considered here as both an active participant and as an observer of the processes enabled by the art installations. Through their engagement with the art-experiments—as clothing and architecture—visitors also participate in the (re)making of the artwork and the architectural space. Each of the art-experiments propose procedures for three-skin exploration and ask questions about space-making and experience-making. Each of the four art-experiments asks a ‘what if’ question. The first art-experiment, Take Away Space, questions the three-skin relationship by asking the question: “What if architectural space is transformed into a wearable accessory?” In the second art-experiment, Clothed Paintings, the question is: “What if the clothed body becomes an architectural element?” The third experiment, [In]Corporeal Architecture, challenges the relationship even further by asking the question: “What if we can experience someone else’s personal space(s)?” Finally, the last experiment, in the form of a student workshop, shares the interest in ‘wearing space’ with the first art-experiment but asks the more precise question: “What if we use corporeal experience of an architectural space to make a wearable object?” Using a combination of critical reflection on my personal experiences of the art-experiments and the analysis of exhibition documentation and visitors’ response, the research explores how the clothed body participates in space-making processes. The methodology of the art-experiment has shaped the theoretical framework of the research, which includes theories and concepts that have contrasting viewpoints of the body and its multiple relationships with the immediate environment. Ideas of phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Juhani Pallasmaa on the sensorial relations of the body and its surroundings were adequate theoretical bases for the analyses of the corporeal experience as a starting point of each art-experiment. The spatial events generated by the experiments highlighted intricate and dynamic relationships between the human and nonhuman participants (clothes and architecture). To address these complexities, it was appropriate to expand the framework to include theories on the agency of nonhuman by Bruno Latour, Jane Bennet, Tim Ingold and Ian Hodder and the process philosophy of Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, Erin Manning and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The art-experiments could be described as a probing polygon for the disruption of a default three-skin relationship. The art-experiments resulted in the creation of a new body–clothes–architectural assemblages where skins continuously transform and absorb each other. Instead of providing answers to the ‘what if’ questions, the experiments revealed essential ‘cross-sections’ of the spatial situations resulting from the experiments: body-clothes, space-making, wearing space and sharing space.