thesis statement
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the heritage as well as the descents of the anglo-saxons has carried out a society and agenda that define our modernity. science has no author, the speaker who tells the ‘history’ has no name, and theories have no “i”s. the absence of an author in the ‘objective truth’ that we live in has quietly contoured an angle that points towards a direction from which ‘a gaze’ has always been present, and it is the ‘un-presence’ of this ‘gazer’ that grants him his power and authority.
is it problematic that this ‘gazer’ has such authority? the answer varies. but is any part of our humanity as well as any number of human beings suffering – due to the presence of this authority? my answer is yes. hypothetically, will the collapse of this authority alleviate the pain that the others are going through? i do not know until i experiment with it.
what if we make an attempt to break down this authority, both literally and figuratively, or in other words, from figuratively to literally? to figuratively break down the authority, we ‘analyse information’ of its authorship – imagine when the preface becomes part of the content, the footnotes become part of the content, the prologue becomes part of the content, and when the course of life of the author becomes part of the content – when every single existence becomes biographical, or becomes biographies, the notion of biography – the separation between the biographer and their subject, between he and the others, between the gazer and the gazed – as well as the power dynamics that this separation has inevitably built – diminishes.
(when the film clips that i use are required of the credits of their authors, why is the tv that is playing the film clips not being asked for the same? do the anonymous coherently lack their own agency? here, i beg for an introspective gaze at the power dynamics of the discipline of architecture – the power dynamics that architecture inhabits, the power dynamics that it has inherited and carries on, and the power dynamics that it is passing down through education – the power dynamics that solve neither housing crisis nor racial issues…)
in this installation, every medium and every piece of existence has a biography.
not only the film clips – ‘the art’– will be ‘credited’ through texts, but also – the chronological and geographical memories of every pre-existed ‘artefacts’ – of ‘the anonymous’ – that you are looking at – will be present and equally displayed through texts.
what determines the contour of ‘personal’?
what negotiates the self and the surroundings?
what do the breakdown of the narrative and the consistency of the objects suggest?
some thoughts throughout
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the definition of collecting – it might seem obvious but there is a clear difference between collecting vs. accumulating, gathering, etc. the word “collecting”, to some degree, has been institutionalised by ‘museums’; so there is a strong subtext to the word that implies the end goal being a collection (usually one that is as complete as possible).
i have always been interested in interrogating words; as ‘collecting’ implies an act that is self-aware as well as one that has a sense of being a long-term project. collecting imbues objects (that are often insignificant to others) with a special significance as part of a grouping.
collection vs. consumption is also pertinent in this context.
as people who engage in arts and architecture, we are often supposed to engage in production (of culture, of legacy, of housing, of buildings, etc.), but what do we consume? how is collecting different from consuming (if at all)? perhaps the difference at its most basic is that collecting is generally thought of as a/the long-term stewardship of the inessential, usually associated with luxury and goods. but in some ways i would say collecting is a pursuit of self completion-- yet it is a work/a project that will never end (e.g. i may collect children's books for my entire life and still not see every possible book, etc.).
things have agency as well in this context – how they exert their power on us. this is something that i have seen timothy ingold write about a lot in very compelling ways. he often talks about how academics, etc. only talk about the “materiality” of things/how we use things, but never how things grow through us using them or how they exert power on us.
collecting is also very much a social practice (whether it is an expression of self, an entrance into niches with other individuals of similar interests, trades, etc.).
the third part could be incorporated into the first two rather seamlessly. for example, how do we think of collecting as an early modern/renaissance european impulse to categorise the newly discovered world (e.g. the americas). this is the most generally taught history of collecting. how can we refute this, while acknowledging the deep implications it has when we even use a word like “collecting”?
museums, which is to “collect things”, are used by the “intelligentsia” as a trope of humanities. How might the personal way of collecting challenge or interact with this broader history of collecting? and adding to this, despite most public museums claiming to be stewards of art/culture for the public, their interests have proved time and time again to align with the interests of the moneyed elite. how might an individual collecting/sharing be an insurgent act in the face of this? is it that you get to deem what is valuable for yourself? is it that you keep items in circulation outside of these tightly run institutions?
and to continue with an archaeology of my past (as it is grounded in objects to an extent).
i am playing with drastic scales here. with these collections that i have spoken of (e.g. countless tiny objects), i interrogate the small, yet architecture in its most sellable/most glorious form often speaks of the grand. maybe size/scale is one thread through these three topics presented. the “small” in scale could potentially be replaced with “unnoticed”, “inconspicuous”, or “overlooked”.
i intend to keep the two studies of self and that of the world simultaneous and i would avoid saying that they are in any order – i am hoping they would learn from each other and continue the weaving. with the ongoing investigation, would architecture somehow dissolve and fail to “serve” the humanities?