User:Trashpuppy/Bloody Body of Building

TEXT AS ARCHITECTURE

The previous project I worked on, COBBLED AND CURSED - started from the notion that a work of literature is a piece of architecture that in principle can be entered from any point. Severing narrative from structure and structure from narrative. Semantically, providing dweller with dwelling for open ended drifting, with window and door opening inside and outside: there's no outside-text. (Not to be interpreted as: there is no outside-culture)

TRIAD

While perceiving literature as a building, a construct, I also perceive architecture as an apt metaphor for the body. Equally constructed, a compartment with dominant forms and desired traits. Here, ending up with a triad all tangle of things - text, building and body. Buildings with heart and spine, a text with a body stitched from language and the body with windows to the soul. The analogies are endless. Endlessly tagging along symbolic ballast: a door is never just a door. It always opens and closes onto something.

Upon moving to Rotterdam I was overwhelmed by the speed at which the urban formula was stamped out of the ground. One day the street was all broken up. The pavement torn open to show a multitude of tubes all tangled in dirt. The next day, no trace. Everything was neatly patched up again. It made me think of surgery, the soft tissue and bones poking out, exposed. I was somewhat astounded by the speed and invisibility (in some of the cases, in the contrary to the high buildings erected) of these altercations. The city functions as a palimpsest. The visibility of the trace depends on

the depth of drilling -

and time

Is our time one of excavation or smoothing over?

Aside from speed there was force

images of construction moved in through windows to come down with a cracking punch in the

gut

hitting on something

"For that is the terrible thing, that I did recognise it.
I recognise everything here, and that's why it goes right through me: it is at home in me" (p. 48)

BUILDINGS AS BODIES

Collection of piercing images collected over the last couple of months. Initially intended as stills in a short film. Not sure if I still will

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A construction site, interpolating between demolition and creation, rubble and debris, reminds of the remaining site of construction. The human body

housing, a similar violence

Giving birth

gives death

to alternate outcome

FOUND FOOTAGE FILM

I have been working on a short video compiled from found footage. Combining footage from medical archives, Dutch news archives and home videos, this method fits with my overall artistic approach that often relies on the reworking and remixing of found materials. I wanted to experiment with moving image and sound. I have recorded a lot of sounds of construction sites around Rotterdam. For now, the video juxtaposes footage of the body, hands primarily, with that of construction sites. Anonymous hands point out. Indecent, suggestive and indirectly. Anonymous hands, tooling. Catching on identity A-shaking with linguistic games wrapped in symbolism.

All this, with internal structure of moving imagery pulled along the invisible sexual arch, the perfect attempt at tension.

How to make a construction site as intimate as the human body?

Or

How to make the human body as alienated as a construction site?

The body as a constant witness. You experience the world through a being in the world in a body. A city you experience through being in your body in the embodiment of a city, architecture