Reflection

My movement, videos and site-writing perform a study of Square Viger. I walk along its ledges, jumping up from the pathways, walk through dandelion fields, over broken tiles by rock piles or scattered garbage and find myself unsettled by my trajectory across these threshold spaces.[1] Jane Rendell speaks about the transitional spaces and psychological effects in “undoing architecture.”[2] She draws my attention not only to the fences, benches, ledges and sculpture but to the corners, curves, holes, lines, cervices that create these architectural features. I stumble upon these through movement and writing. The site appears whole until I walk through and see its segments. Just as Valie Export explores edged and angled curves with her body and photography, I find myself following the site’s forms. Export and Rendell inspire me to imbue my spatial inquiry with imaginative associations and formations. I reimagine the site’s spatiality and its objects by the way I pass through it and what I observe. The site is a home, the structure like walls of a room, the cervices lead to other rooms, the grass a household carpet, benches like couches, tiles of the bathroom or kitchen, paths are like hallways. I walk along ledges like pathways, walk along the sidewalk at a diagonal according to the angled bricks, lay along the ledge or fold over benches.

This site is a microcosm of activity for the imagination, as well as to witness a moment in its historical shift, be in its present and wonder about its future. It reorients expectations of experience through its decay, redevelopments, maintenance or lack of maintenance, and crumbling condition of its materials. No matter the changes to its scenography, the scenographic elements of the site continue to gather people together as was the initial intent of its design; now it gathers humans in addition to birds, bugs and wild (some tamed) plant-life. Though it may likely be the outcome of someone being there, I also saw a gathering of rocks and tiles. The park invites unsanctioned movements in its orientations, layerings, ecologies, activities, and the relation of objects, humans, natural elements and animals. With all these factors, the site experience cannot be entirely predetermined. In this “atmospheric transformation,”[3] I’m caught in the transition between the site’s many worlds. There is a feeling of discomfort or unsettledness from being oriented by the site’s “active qualities.”[4] Performance or spatial embodiment here was unsettling in the vulnerability of extending myself amidst this uncontrolled scenography. My body finds an orientation in the ledges, cracks, corners and curves, which was not how I knew my body would be or react here. The site invites an unknown sense of knowing and being about myself.

Additionally, aside from these qualities, there is then the possibility of interaction with others. I walked to the top of the ledge and another person unknown to me, followed my action after and placed an orange traffic cone where I was standing. My response to the site, elicited another response echoing the layering effect of its scenography. I felt unsettled because through that action opened another world, not by choice yet now happening in my experience nonetheless. My observations and movement here were not isolated to my own embeddedness. In being here, I opened myself to the experience and conversation at play, becoming an actor in the site’s scenography, part of its ecology and a contributor to the site’s improvisation.

Instead of finding my movements preoccupied by the built forms, I realized their potential impact and that none of my movements are without effect seen or unseen, in being here I alter the scenography. In being here I am part of its ecology. Through my actions, I encountered the site’s many worlds. It is all in flux, my presence and movement feel temporary yet there is a permanence in being here. Each step layers onto its palimpsest of minute and quotidian memory keeping. In how I entered the world of that man with the cone for a moment in time, how he responded to enter mine and how we both continue to move forward through the scenography of this site and this city and our movement from here.

[1] Raoul Bunschoten, “The Thinking Hand,” in Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice, edited by Katie Lloyd Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2007), 81.

[2] Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2010), 27.

[3] Rachel Hann, Beyond Scenography (New York: Routledge, 2019), 2.

[4] Ibid.