Interjectures - in midst of ‘either-or’s - 2
Interjectures - in midst of ‘either-or’s - 2
30 January 2023
Location
33 First Floor Front and Online
Speaking between two things (as child, as grown up); speaking of two things at the same time (the porcelain tower of Nanjing, the pagoda of Kew); being either one or two (collective unconscious, intersubjectivity); being neither, but in transition between (play, dream). The transitional is not only to access the condition of the intermediary; it supports the process of recognising what is beyond politics of identity and production of subjectivity, and opens up indeterminant, affective engagement and reciprocity between what may be posted as the outside, the inside and at the threshold. In this often misinterpreted and neglected realm, potentiality works in both ways: to become or un-become, finding me or not-me. The episode Desiring Transitionality explores such desires
for a sustained state of ambivalence, materially, affectually, corporeally,
psychically and politically. For instance, through the gaze that intersect
child development and urban intervention, care and pedagogical relations, and
transitional play in exceptional periods afforded by certain constructional and
architectural experimentations in urban playgrounds; and through the emergence
of the ‘chinoiserie’ in the West that evidence the gape of modernity and the
construction of the Other to fulfill, by means of rhetorical, aesthetic,
architectural and environmental substitutes, the loss and desires of being
childish, feminine and animalistic.
Three seminar sessions on the theme of Desiring Transitionality will make up the second episode of the PhD seminar series INTERJECTURES 2023. 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.
Interjectures seminar series
brings forth, through forms of collaborative debates, positions and opinions
poised as ‘either-or’ at fractures and junctures of histories, languages,
identities and places. These are sites of interruption and mis-alignment, often
marginal to centric views, foreign to assumed similarities, strangers to
ourselves, where alternative intelligibility has been obfuscated under dominant
projections. Each episode engages multilateral and recursive processes of
re-reading and contesting stable pictures, particular those conserved through
power, morality and tradition, to unravel incomplete and nuanced
interpretations - the making of sense amidst digression and transgression -
that expose the inadequacy of given meanings and acknowledge productive
ambivalence. By operating more as dangerous supplements, complicit mediums,
unfaithful translations and precarious hybrids, ‘interjectures’ conjure the
‘either-or’ as possibilities of unexpected affinity that defy the assumed
boundaries under disciplinary, territorial, discursive or epistemological
terms.
Session 1 - Dream
30 Jan 10am–2pm
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.
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 18th 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
31 Jan 10am–1:30pm
The second session continues to probe the possibility of an occupation of a place as a distinct ‘location of transition’, which, in order to meet the condition of play, entails an occupation without lack. The child at play, as understood through Winnicott, engaging with transitional object and space, considers and occupies the environment and the components it offers as part of its subjective constitution, which meets the psychic needs of the child and prevents the projection of lacks that leads to the formation of desires and drives. This opens up a ’threshold’ moment’, between an innate ability and a give-and-take negotiation as a condition of existence, to straddle subjective needs and imagination, objective affordance and potentiality, projective expansion of subjecthood, introjective absent-presence of care-relation, and transitional re-enactment of the lost object. The child’s immediacy to play is, ironically and menacingly, countered by the lost ability to play when an ‘other’, often closest in proximity to us, marks a presence by means of a pre-determined boundary of identity or territory, i.e. the next category, the next country. Any possible encounters, in this sense, require a process of climbing over, kicking through and breaking down, taking on the precarity of being ‘out of place’ and the excess of recognition that enables the stepping in and stepping out. The ‘play field’ as that which unfolds the aesthetic encounter, the weight and experience of crossing a frame as a kaleidoscopic passage, and the contested ‘friend/enemy’ figure of the neighbour, ethically and territorially interrogated, will remind us again of what may have been forgotten as the potentiality of play.
Schedule
10:00am - Introduction: Doreen Bernath and Gabriela Jimenez
10:15am - Lorens Holm: Seminar on the Neighbour, Architecturally and Psychoanalytically Considered
11:00am - Gabriela Jimenez: The Play Field
11.45–12.00pm Break
12:00pm - Claire Potter: Kicked a Wardrobe Lately? The Lion, the Witch & the Transition
12:45pm - Discussion with Merce Rodrigo and all guest presenters
1 Feb 2pm–6pm
Pre-empted by the conditions of dream and play, now is the scape of escape by diving into the paradox of instability and doubt, where beliefs and questions of belong are suspended between worlds and cosmoses, and the constituency of selves is constantly being morphed through ingestion and expulsion. How to transit when everything is already in transit? Questions are raised here through paracosm, swimming, id-entity crisis and counter-aesthetics, either as architecture as itself, or as that which is larger than, and breaking away from, itself. Yet the momentum unravelled in these sessions is precisely to step aside from the identification and perpetual self-reference when architecture is subject to the trajectory of the projective. Instead, the dream-displacement, play-transition, affect-entanglement, threshold-discovery, aesthetic-modulation and world-paracosm bring forth alternative modes of spatial enactment, where architecture materialises through the recognition of the many selves that hide with the tiger under the table, ride with the wind that carries the chimes of the bells on the porcelain tower, and plunge into a pool of slanted affective fields, where we are moving and being moved. In this sense, architecture is the actuality of transit.
Schedule
2:00pm - Introduction: Doreen Bernath, Gabriela Jimenez and Tian Pan
2:10pm - Mark Morris: The Paracosm as a Transitional Reality
2:40pm - Naina Gupta: Potential, Potential Space
3:10am - John Abell: Psychical Transitionality and the Architectural Object
3:40pm–4:00pm Break
4:00pm - Teresa Stoppani: (Either) Architecture or Theory, or, Id-entity Crisis
4:30pm - Madeleine Liyen Ang Griffiths: Counter-Aesthetics - Thresholds of Belonging
5:00–6:00pm - Discussion with Nerma Cridge, Manijeh Verghese, Merce Rodrigo, Marina Lathouri and all guest presenters