wreck city space
BIBT: the poetics of slow architecture & the artist-designed environment as a temporary production platform for the various actors that fabricate, narrate & deliver contemporary queer safety
As I developed the structure of this project, I wanted to think about the three-dimensional architecture and space suggested by a platform, that while maintaining it’s presence as an independent sculptural object, through use, performatively lent itself as temporary agent of production, (for BIBT’s purposes, the platform extended both to the space of the bed and the implied ideas of leisure & rest) - which then acts & reacts in relation to the changing modes of production, consumption and representation it triggers. Like an imaginary central nervous system, the platform synchronized encounters with an emerging performative architecture which gradually, and through use, revealed modes of articulating ideas & feelings of safety, morality, belonging and personal histories in relation to a non-hierarchical collective experience that continuously challenged and regrouped the architectural agency of the platform - as object that mediates properties of both shared experience and the sculptural field. In between these maneuverings, this ephemeral architecture also reconfigured the installation’s physical components, creating a dynamic between the many potentially fixed or static elements and the new performative responses to space and architecture (taking in account both mental and physical constructions). It was this interrelationship of introducing a live architecture of thought in relation to forms of spatial experience, that gave way to performative encounters with the sculptural space of the platform. As Wreck City progressed, I began to shift my understanding of a performative space - from being a planned and choreographed experience, to something that is in relation to an emerging architecture of ideas (which can be either physical or imagined, or in BIBT’S case, both) that builds an interdisciplinary network in which work on the installation of material for a particular action triggered off a chain of interlinked and succeeding ideas for the script of a performance, in which the handling of an object gives rise to an idea for a new sculptural situation, or in which an object suggests a text, or a song. In other words, the performative value linked to the sculptural situation set up by the platform was also linked to a loop of activities that crystalized into others - a circulation of knowledge that re-nourished the overall BIBT architecture as the performance of key questions at either a discursive and analytic level became more important than obtaining revealing answers.
