PUBLIC DOMAIN
ISTANBUL BIENNALE 2012: ADHOCRACY
A collaboration between C+S Architects and Pari Riahi Architects
"Take your own journey according to your own plans. Pay little need to the ease of convenient, crowded paths. Accept that you might take the wrong turn and have to turn back, or perhaps keep on going until you forge uncommon ways out to the world. This is the best journey you can take. And, if you feel impelled by your sensitivity, record what you saw and felt, what you said and heard said...”
J. Saramago, Viaggio in Portogallo, Turin 1999
To inhabit an environment is to leave traces on it. One’s use and bodily experience shape these traces. To map an environment is to re-read/re-write those traces.
In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes of the city of Ersilia whose inhabitants traced threads to affirm emotions, establish relationships and articulate connections. We imagine that to inhabit the world, one becomes a traveller of shifting landscapes. We like to invite the Biennale visitors to take a journey through our installation. In this voyage, they are invited to temporarily inhabit the landscapes we create by leaving traces of their own.
The project creates an open structure where the process of making traces has already been started. The public is encouraged to mark a series of tracings on the walls. The project takes place in a room within the site of the Biennale. The walls will be punctuated with constellation of nails with patterns based on aerial views of four landscapes (a desert, a lagoon as a threshold between earth and water, a sprawl-city, a dense urban landscape). Weaving light threads through these punctuations, a loom will emerge which offers a preliminary context, a basic map to trace upon. The designers will already
weave a series of threads into the looms, in order to initiate the process. The visitors will then trace their preferred paths through this structure. The accumulation and overlay of these tracings, patterns and paths during the time of the installation will result in a collective habitation, part physical and part imaginary.
Each visitor will find colored threads to make his/her own experience, beyond any control by the designers, creating a “collective inhabited landscape”. A camera will be registering the actions of the visitors. The act of passing the threads and creating the imaginary paths is a metaphor of the public domain.