WHERE WE RELIEVE OR HOLD

What shape does the place have? We accidentally meet, brush past each other, evade each other’s gaze but then cross in the mirror, where do we enter together, carrying excited conversation into separated rooms, check each other, compliment, lock doors, look at locked doors, see our signifiers of open and closed, where we relieve or hold. What does it look like, this where? And if it takes on a form, what does it hold together, containing what, how so?

Totality. Unity. Containment. Wholeness. Even though „form“ seems simple at first, it might not be easy to describe and define. As a givenness of material, what provides a shape to an object or a space. The implementation of the driving idea of affordances - the way we relate to things - often raises the question of agency. So does the photo class this summer semester with Flaka Haliti as a Guest Professor, following the reading of the book by Caroline Levine: Forms - Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Focusing on the affordance of aesthetics and political forms, in particular on the form as a synonym for the WHOLE that represents a unifying power, a capacity to hold together desperate parts.

In this room we propose to you our attempt to produce an installation of a bar-bath-room, trying to deconstruct affordances as an opposition between inside and outside, between intimate or private and collective or public as a common place for negotiation and making consensus. The affordances of two representative forms that convey structure: one of the containers that imprisons and controls, the other a dynamic process that brings together conflicting elements such as ununified forms or patterns that overlap with each other. As such this organically disrupts the following order in favor of fissure, discontinuity, and dissonance of the totality as a container of power through form. So the bar-bath project within its simple order made out of benches and boxes, arranged and tiled partly by real tiles and partly illustrated in drawing, is about to get more complicated. Once we start attending the dense intertwining and overlapping of multiple forms intervened by individual projects of students in response to the site specific and content aware project as a whole. Moreover, each artwork conceived brings forward the topics that resist and unsettles social unities and totalities, celebrating instead difference and diversity, queerness and interdependency as alternative social and political forms.

🧼 🛁 💦 🧼 🛁 💦 🧼 🛁 💦 🧼 🛁 💦 🧼 🛁 💦 🧼 🛁 💦 🧼 🛁 💦 🧼 🛁 💦 🧼 🛁 💦 🧼 🛁 💦 🧼 🛁