The Birth of an Author: Someone to Watch Over Me
acrylic, coloured pencils, pastel sticks pens, pencils, water colour.
36 inches by 56 inches.
this drawing is consisted of drawings of some of my toys, figures from childrens book that i have collected, and a few figures from the paintings of Henry Darger. all figures are true to scale.
charcoal sticks and prints on clear flim.
36 inches by 56 inches.
this is an overlay of charcoal drawings of six dwelling motifs and scans of the preface of the book Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture, a book by Bernard Rudofsky originally published in 1964.
acrylic, coloured pencils, pastel sticks pens, pencils, water colour.
36 inches by 56 inches.
initially inspired by the reference, Where the Wild Things Are, made in the preface of the book Wild Things written by Jack Halberstam, this drawing continues the visual grammar of the first drawing, the crossing of the two axes, aiming to display how the marginalised confront and penetrate the society in a plain and literal way.
the text in white reads: the marginality always confront, meet, engage the society theoretically or philosophically.
the text in black, written by Gloria Anzaldúa reads: let us hope that the left hand, that of darkness, of femaleness, of ‘primitiveness’, can divert the right-handed, rational suicide drive that, unchecked, could blow us into acid rain in a fraction of a millisecond.
‘is this an architecture thesis project’
. . . . if you stay here long and patiently enough to read through the texts around you and find their correlated objects, artefacts, furniture, films, books,
then yes.
this space deals with numerous subjects – authorship, the nature of biography, analysis on museums or that on any exhibitional spaces of such nature, the power dynamics in relation to the discipline of architecture, certain absences that have never been addressed properly or systematically through our education, racial as well as classism issues, languages, spatial or geographical memories, the definition of “personal”, anthropology.
if this seems confusing at first glance, please keep in mind that – everything has been broken down through texts (and/or language).
therefore, i genuinely hope that this would be the case where – you enter a space filled with thoughts, but you do not yearn for an author’s presence in order to ‘understand’ their works as well as their thought processes.
. . . . you could absolutely step on the prints on the floor.
i would love you to read through the texts that are around you. books on the bookshelf are also accessible as well. i marked some pages that speak to the project. and please feel free to use the pens and notebook.
«medium»
. . . .that being collecting
i collect toys, old children’s books, and countless tiny objects. The act of collecting converts time into space. there is a tendency of a melancholic temperament in the act of collecting. the more lifeless things are, the more potent and ingenious can be the mind which contemplates them. if this melancholy temperament is faithless to people, it has good reason to be faithful to things.
«building»
. . . .that of the anonymous
the discriminative approach of architectural history is mostly due to parochialism. architecture is now an expert’s art. the philosophy and know-how of the ‘untutored’ and ‘anonymous’ present the largest untapped source of inspiration, for they touch the far tougher and increasingly troublesome problem of how to live and let live.
«environment»
. . . .that of the intelligentsia
what does it mean to be human? the question of “consciousness” of a human cannot be solved within the terms of the western system of knowledge, which is the system of knowledge in which the modern world is brought into existence — including our education. definitions of the intellectual are self-referential, masking its reinforcement of a given social condition. the intellectuals seem to be challenging oppression, but their social role is reliant on an oppressive definition of what it means to be human, which can be traced back to eurocentrism and the legacy of its religious ideology – the notion of ‘reason’ (intellect) has since erected a barrier between ‘man’ and ‘the other’.