Desiring Transitionality - Dream

Dream, as Freud suggested, is both a fulfilment of a wish and a form work. This dream-work of condensation and displacement mark the relations between the manifested dream-content and latent dream-thoughts, which are characterised by rather non-sensical adjacencies, absurd associations, looped paths and short-circuits. By disrupting the centrality of assumed values, often asserted through dominant cultural discourses based on rationality and norms, dream-formation propels transformation precisely because it affords the ‘innervation’, the energetic mobilisation of psychic agencies between the conscious and the unconscious, that presents, sustains and transacts the difference between what has been reduced to and control by the symbolic order, as Lacan said, the desire of the Other, and the recognition of repression that may give clues to the forgotten wish (a fulfilment without lack), the censored thought and an alternate self. This session expands the affordance of dream-work with the tiger, Billiard Room, pineapples, pagodas, Lobi vessels, bateba figures and Chinoiserie-Occidenterie objects to displace the colonial gaze and the counter-gaze of the postcolonial that perpetuate the same lacks. Transition is to be reconceptualised not as that which denies or is liberated from locality, but that locality itself is an occupation of mobility by the subject specifically to maintain an ability to dream as a domain of possibilities of, in Mark Cousins’ terms, the unbearable pleasure of being otherwise.

Dream is the first of the three seminar sessions on the theme of Desiring Transitionality, which is the second episode of the PhD seminar series Interjectures 2022-23. The ‘Desiring Transitionality’ episode will be co-convened by Doreen Bernath, Gabriela Jimenez and Tian Pan. Each session engages presentations by guest speakers, followed by comments and discussions, and is open to participants from the PhD and graduate school programmes, as well as open to the larger AA school and community.

Image: Lilian Chee and Toby Fong, Tracing the Last Tiger, 2020.

Watch online here.

SCHEDULE

10:00am - Introduction: Doreen Bernath and Tian Pan

10:15am - Lilian Chee: Swerving with a Tiger - Architecture After the Animal

11:00am - Tian Pan: Desiring the Childish, Feminine, and Animalistic - The Introjection of Chinese Architecture in the 18^th century Britain

11.45–12.00pm Break

12:00pm - Richard Adetokunbo Aina: The Lobi Vessel - Realising Repatriation

12:45pm - Discussion with Merce Rodrigo and all guest presenters

Guest discussant

Merce Rodrigo-Garcia is an architect and PhD candidate at Birkbeck College. After studying at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), she obtained her MArch from Research Architecture Goldsmiths. She has taught at Oxford Brookes University, has been a fellow at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and has held residencies and participated in symposia internationally.

Guest presenters and abstracts

Lilian Chee

Swerving with a Tiger - Architecture After the Animal

Why is a tiger prowling through the passages of architectural discourse? Since its appearance in 1902, a tiger called Stripes continues to be associated with the Billiard Room of the Raffles Hotel. Coalescing other non-human and animistic worlds omnipresent in Southeast Asian folkloric beliefs, the tiger’s enduring persistence in the colonial monument demands scrutiny. This paper is constructed around the ongoing stickiness of Stripes, other tigers, the presence of animals and their anecdotes in architectural discourse. Taking up Jennifer Bloomer’s provocation to go with the swerve of the unexpected, here I adopt the tiger as a protagonist for architectural history, making it central to the discourse of a discipline that is exclusively anthropocentric. The tiger’s anecdotal form consequently shapes my discursive method and critique since the presence of the animal in architecture fundamentally strains its epistemological, ontological and ethical frontiers.

Lilian Chee is Associate Professor of Architectural Theory and Design at the National University of Singapore, where she leads the Research by Design Cluster. Her research connects embodied experience and affective evidence with architectural representation, affect theory, feminist politics, and creative practice methods. Her award-winning film collaboration 03-FLATS (2014) has screened in 16 major cities. Current publications include Architecture and Affect (forthcoming, 2023), Art in Public Space (2022), and Remote Practices (2022), and a short film Objects for Thriving (2022) studying elderly occupants and their spaces through domestic objects. She leads a Social Sciences Research Council funded project examining flexible place and home-based work practices and their relational transformation of public and domestic spaces. She writes on affect, architectural representation and domesticity.

Tian Pan

Desiring the Childish, Feminine, and Animalistic - The Introjection of Chinese Architecture in the 18^th century Britain

Regarding dream as a way to enact desire-transnationality, regarding chinoiserie architecture as a collective dream in 18th century Britain to fulfill the void of modernity, specifically to fulfill and transit the desire to reunite with God and nature. In this talk, I will use three themed dreams about chinoiserie architecture: “dreams of becoming childish”, “dreams of becoming feminine”, and “dreams of becoming animalistic” to explore how Britain, as a collective subject, introjects Chinese architectural knowledge into its own psyche based on the fact that even though Britain had met obstacles in encountering real China, it still chose to continue constructing its chinoiserie dream in a fantastical manner. Geographically, this study traces the transition of the narrative of The Porcelain Tower at Nanjing from China to Britain from the 16th century to the 18th century for constructing a British version of “Chineseness” in architecture via European missionaries, merchants, and officials. The Chinese House at Shugborough, The Pagoda Fountain at Alton Towers Resort, The Chinese Pavilion at Wrest Park, and The Great Pagoda at Kew Garden are examples to understand how this transition ended up in the construction of architectural object with displacement and condensation of the reality of China. Aesthetically, this study investigates the impact of the introjection of Chinese architectural knowledge on the developing concept of "taste" in 18th-century Britain incorporated with Gothic and Rococo styles. Psychically, this study will analyze how the void of modernity has driven Britain to project “others” through its expanding colonialism agenda, and at the same time, to introject such projected others back to form an expanded self, such as through attempts of staging chinoiserie architecture in the scene of the international exhibition to present these “others” which were Britain’s own projections. By rethinking chinoiserie from a psychoanalytic perspective, this study aims to contribute to the theory and practice of us and others and question the categorisation of architecture on a national basis.

Tian Pan is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. She previously studied architecture at Chongqing University, the National University of Singapore, and University College London. Her research interest lies in exploring the boundaries and relations of reality and fantasy, of “us” and “others” and the collective unconsciousness. She has played a traditional Chinese string instrument-“Erhu” for over fifteen years and is enthusiastic about ink painting and calligraphy.

Richard Adetokunbo Aina

The Lobi Vessel - Realising Repatriation

In response to the current paradigm that has been triggered since President Macron’s seminal speech at the University of Ouagadougou in 2017 – in which he vowed that France would begin to return West African objects of antiquity that are in their possession. The research initially explored the possibility of coherently addressing this rupture, reoriented through a Lobi-specific taxonomy of dwelling reimagined in a contemporary architecture called the Vessel that rehoused their bateba figures.

Richard Adetokunbo Aina is a multidisciplinary designer, teacher and researcher with particular strengths that reside in architectural/spatial design, architectural writing, furniture craft and conceptual filmmaking. His particular interests in amalgam typologies and liminal space drive his exploration toward contemporary West African aesthetic expression. Which he has recently coined ‘afro-revivalism’. Images: drawings by Richard Aina.

Find out more about the other events in the series Desiring Transitionality - Play and Desiring Transitionality - TransitTransitionality - Transit