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Research Project: IMMAGINATED ARCHITECTURES: ARCHITECTONICAL GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION AND “OTHER-IMAGES”
NARNI REVISITED: DRAWINGS AND ARTISTIC INTERVENTIONS WITH A WOOLEN YARN PEDRO ANTÓNIO JANEIRO,1 IVO COVANEIRO2 Department of Drawing and Visual Communication, Faculty of Architecture, Technical University of Lisbon (FA/UTL), Lisbon, Portugal; CIAUD – Centro de Investigação em Arquitectura Urbanismo e Design (FA/UTL) – Research Project Imagined-Architectures: Architectonical Graphical Representation and “OtherImages”; pajaneiro@gmail.com; Text. (2) Faculty of Architecture, Technical University of Lisbon (FA/UTL), Lisbon, Portugal; CIAUD – Centro de Investigação em Arquitectura Urbanismo e Design (FA/UTL) – Research Project Imagined-Architectures: Architectonical Graphical Representation and “Other-Images”; ivocovaneiro@gmail.com; Image Art. (1)
The present paper aims to present a new point of view about what “a drawing” for architecture can be. Invented from a true story: the story of a child that in the dining room at the home of his grandmother, with rows of colored wool, tied the door handle to the lamp, and from the lamp he tied the leg of the table, and from there until the nail that hangs a blue watercolor; and from there to another point and so on…, this project we now present is a metaphor for looking at a place (in the present case, an Italian city: Narni) in a new way. With this new approach on Drawing – 3 dimensional drawings done with colored “lines” of wool –,through simple (artistic?) interventions, signal (in order to call people’s attention) the necessity to preserve that city architectural Heritage. As this child, using lines of wool, were built artistic interventions in the architectural heritage in the historic center of a small town. This installation with lines, with a signaling function, woke up the space and aroused the objects of their quotidian heritage; giving them another sense: from anonymous to main protagonists. From forgotten-objects to visible-objects that need care and preservation. The purpose of this (art-)work was to intervene effectively in the Heritage of this city, valuing it and putting it in evidence and at the same time giving them other possibilities to be read from new aesthetic experience. My father, when I was a kid drew like anyone: my first contact with this “thing” that is remove from reality, or create from (invisible-)imagination, other-“thing”similar-like-“it” was through him; he invented landscapes, explained things to me, drew donkeys (still my favorite animal), flowers made of hearts, Speedy Gonzalez, all through drawings. When I was a child I used to go to my father’s studio, and there, he gave me sheets of paper; in those times I could not even read and I didn’t know the weight 106
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of words. He gave me paper and I drew. I was trying to repeat my father’s drawings. I was drawing, just drawing: things. Drawing is good but it has a price. It is true that I was trying to repeat my father’s drawings, but what I really liked to draw was my hand. With my hand over the A4 sheet and with a graphite pencil I was making the line travel around the periphery of my left hand. Only much time later I met Lascaux. Only much time later I met The Life of Forms, followed by the Praise of the Hand by Henri Focillon, first published in 1943. Hands, he says: “They are almost alive beings. Are they slaves?” The hands, I remind you the text: “[…] in the back light of one witness of the great Resurrection of Lazarus, the working and academic hand of Dr. Tulp, holding with a clamp a bundle of arteries in the Anatomy Lesson, Rembrandt’s hand drawing, the amazing hand of St. Matthew writing the Bible dictated by an angel, the hands of the old cripple in Coin of One Hundred Florins, duplicated by the big and naive gloves hanging from his waist.” My own hands on a draw, those I made when I was a child, I don’t have even one copy today. The hands are slaves of the Spirit. (Before continuing I need to say one thing. In fact, several things. Point one: I consider more the Human than erudition, more who-speaks than what-is-speaking-the-speaker. Point two: I consider more important to talk about what is needful to speak in first person than exhaust ourselves in quotes, bibliographies, and authors, and, above all, that I reject, with all my cells, the (academic?) fear to say what we really think about the things of the world using, instead of the majestically typical plural of scientific discourses, the word myself. Only one more point, please, point three: that I am fully aware, on the one hand, that the speech-about-something is replacing that something; and, on the other hand, I don’t have, as human, legitimacy to speak about something that I don’t know. And more, point four: that the Truth in Science is a relative value, therefore a paradox, upgradeable; that the only Discipline where Truth is not is a “continuous movement” is for Theology (which, interestingly, is the study of God); to finish, point five: I am, as the way that Heidegger describe things, Mortal on Earth and I can make mistakes and/or review my positions on things.) It amazes me Lascaux: the silhouette of a man’s hand before me on the wall of a cave saying him, saying to me: “I am here and I was here.” Here, really here: where he was with his feet in the same place where I am, where he – assuming his verticality – had been with his own two feet supporting his body. Here, architecture. He and me: men. Drawing is, among other things, a will of the body. Who draws knows that is the body who wants another draw: one more fixed instant, even if it is the last one. Marie Antoinette Habsburg-Lorraine, it is said, asked the man who pulled the rope – which was also a line – the guillotine on 16 October 1793: “Just one more minute.” Just one more minute (to see again), a second look, a new look. One minute to see. To see the world for the last time. 107
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We live concentrated in draws as a product. Finished, if they could speak, they would tell us the world, but the drawings do not speak, they don’t say nothing, they are silent, they do not delight us like the words enchant us, they don’t deceive us, they don’t cheat us, they don’t lie to us, the drawings are always true, even those of Escher, and they are always “this”, even the Ceci from “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”; the drawings are the world and from the world itself. The draws are always Ceci, This. They live from This, they replace This (This is always the world) I mean: they, as a product, are a vestige of a human moment in the world. I am fascinated with this idea: that the drawing is a kind of robbery. A drawing al vif, among other things, is a kind of fragment that I cut and steal to reality. Drawing is a permissible robbery: because what one draw steal, gives it back in double or more, to the stolen world. When I say that some draw is good then the world is richer because, as a product, that draw is one more object in the world. I steal but I give it back: what-I-steal don’t stay because the movement of the world is continuous, but what I give – this instant of world turned into a thing – replace it. I say that I steal, but I know that I give it back. If I draw on a portable support (a sheet of paper, for example) I steal and I bring the stolen world under my arm; if I draw on a surface that I cannot carry with me (on a wall, on the floor, on the glass of one window, for example) I leave a trace of my crime at the scene of the crime; If I draw on the dirty surface of a car with my finger, then my drawing will travel; in this is evolved my body who wants it. When it was presented to me the concept of “intentionality” – by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, my guides, through their written word – not only changed my life as I began to see a draw as, like all things that the body produces, a practical posture of one theoretical and philosophical proposal; an effectively encased of the body with the world, a combination of the body-that-is-world with the world-itself, a split of consciousness through, not what is surrounding me – because, in fact, nothing is around me – but through feeling the body-that-draws, while is drawing, world. If I draw on my skin on the palm of my hand or on my neck for example, then the problem is deeper. Who draws knows that while the drawing takes place on a surface we can feel, in the fingers and in the hand that holds a pencil or a pen or a brush, the line; there is a tact that involves the hand that is drawing; we feel the hand seducing the leaf or the wall with points, lines or spots until the world be the world, until the world, anamorphic and labyrinthic, turns into a form. Although even if is not the hand that touches the sheet, we can feel the sheet in the hand. If I draw on my skin then I feel the skin on the hand that is drawing and the skin being drawn: it is one, actually, interface, the line is not from the hand nether is from the skin, but, paradoxically, is from both of them. The function of the pencil is, while I am using it, drop a line. The graphite cylinder that is inside of the dark of my pencil made wood, in molecule, is a diamond (a carbon in its purest state), its function is, through me, my body, feel the glow that flows by the contours of things that make what-I-call world. The graphite inside my pencil, or the cubic centimeters of ink from my pen, can, potentially, build a line with thousands of meters. From the tip of my pencil or my pen, if pressed against a surface, came out from the disordered world, the world seen by me: a world reconstructed by lines 108
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saying borders between figures and backgrounds, if the lines are intertwined we get clear and darkness, starting points and ending points finishing a draw, finishing sentences if I used them to write. I do This with my hand. Points, centimeters, meters, and miles of line. A line sleeping inside my pencil, chaotic, meaningless in the cylinder, and because of the will of my body, through the line, decides to wake the things of the world. Just one more minute. I also remember how, as a child, I disembarrassed a skein of wool line that my grandmother opened with her arms until being built a sphere, a ball. From the incredibly strange skein of wool, anamorphic and senseless, embarrassed and full of nudes of wool, ran a line. From the open arms of my grandmother to my right hand that rolled over my left hand a harmony, I remember the time (which took the wool ball). I learned only after the Metaphysics and the eleven concentric spheres of Aristotle made of an unchanging fifth element, a perfectly transparent substance known as “ether”, one immediately beyond the blue, a blue in transcendence, a blue in coma. I didn’t know, at that time, about Eudoxus and Callipus. Even now for me to draw is this: we are solving the nodes of the skein, catching the end of a line and put it in order (my order) the violent chaos of the world. And, perhaps, this is why the drawing interests me more as process than as a product: I am more interested to run the line than the ball ready, the process than the product. I am more interested in the gesture of the hand, how many times it stop, the speed the line travels from the skein to the ball of wool than the ball or the skein; I am interested, especially about, the time. Every drawer knows that while he is drawing the time seems to stop: a kind of putting parentheses in the world while we see the line turning into a thing, an epoché, a kind of ek-stasis. Ready the wool balls my grandmother built sweaters (it was therefore also in power in the disorder of the thread, through the use of line, the temperature); and I, with these lines of colored wool: tied the door handle (of the little room where we had lunch) to the lamp, and from the lamp, with the line stretched, I tied the leg of the table, and from the table leg, I stretched it well, until the nail that hangs a blue watercolor of the Swiss artist Fred Kradolfer (an underwater landscape); and from there, from that steel nail which is still there today, I stretched the line carefully to the shade of the lamp that was on top of a small table next to the couch, and from there to the key (made of yellow metal with cute letters saying OLAIO) of the closet door where was kept the white porcelain and cobalt, and from there to another point, and from that point to another; point by point I traveled the line of wool, until, after a few hours of creative work, like inside of a web, I stopped amazed, just to see it. Just to see how that room, through my own intervention (artistic?), had won other senses. At the time I didn’t know, but I built three-dimensional drawings. After all, the line that comes out from the anonymous cylinder of a graphite pencil or the container that holds the ink inside a pen, is not so different from the line coming out of a ball of wool: in “intentionality”, the line is exactly the same, in the will of body and in use, the pencil line and the line of a woolen ball, are the same; the same line that Pseudo-Apollodoro tells us, the line of Ariadne and Theseus in the labyrinth of Daedalus, in the Library. 109
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Actually, I just realized what I did with the line that came out of the chaotic skein, labyrinthine, was a drawing (a three-dimensional drawing) a few months ago (22-29 July, 2011) in an exercise of drawing with lines of wool in a workshop called The Time and the Happening: Drawings as Artistic Interventions that I coordinated in Narni, Italy, at the 9th International Seminary of Architectural Design: “Architecture Town Territory in Transformation, Tradition, Contemporaneity, Sustainability, Project Reflections on Recovery of Historic Towns”. We are so used to flat surfaces to draw that when we can mark (in) the air with a line of wool, for example, we almost forget that we don’t need to stick to the idea of the plan. With the line I linked everything to everything like a fractal or a mathematical ‘curve stitch’ by Mary Everest Boole in the late nineteenth century. My (artistic) “installation” meant that certain aspects of the room were more popular, more noticeable. The line that I used, were pointed certain aspects that, probably, would be forever unnoticed by the inhabitants of the space. This is because the eyes follow the line. In addition to the aesthetic aspects of the installation, seems that the line had almost a signaling function removing from anonymity certain objects or certain characteristics that without it, without the installation of colored threads of wool, nobody, because of habit of using that space, have seen. My installation, my 3D drawing, woke up the space and aroused the objects of our quotidian heritage; giving them another sense: the passage from anonymous to main protagonists; they could be seen: in fact, a spatial experimentation at a scale of 1:1. Anyway: if we draw on a sheet of paper or on a wall, on the glass or on the skin, drawing is always something-between. Between what and what? Between whom and whom? Between whom and what? Between what and whom? From drawing and the draw interests me especially the time, I am interested in the meantime that the draw saves. Almada Negreiros said: “A drawing is our understanding to grab a moment.” It is true. Time, that great sculptor. Time without the tyranny of Chronos, the time invisible, intangible, sensitive: sensitive, means, because I feel it happening; a Kairos, “the right time,” “timely,” καιρός, “mine”. The time that I care about, is because of that, a drawing, is the time of the happening of the draw and not so much the product of that happening. If the Time born from the relation between me and the things(-in-myself), then I can tell you, is because this time is (or exists) inherent to that (or in) my relationship. A draw is the remnant, is what remains from this relationship, and drawing this own relationship. That’s why I said that drawing is putting in practice the notion of “intentionality” very well described from the Discipline of Phenomenology and Existentialism. In this sense - the sense that I can admit the existence of a correlation between the act of drawing that aims to achieve (the intentionality) and the target object - the object is not only a pretext for the construction of a synthesis of subjective 110
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identity through which I can become aware of myself; it - the object if drew it – is, primarily, a unit of meaning - “[the object] is not, then, more than a face-toface (Gegenstand), and my consciousness the place where those face-to-face exist; more: to tell the truth, those face-to-faces are the only way I know I have something named as conscious; even more: consciousness is not conscious of herself. She always needs an object. It is through this relationship that I draw things and, is in this process, in this face-to-face, that, in a certain point of view, things are not for me just an excuse to build a synthesis of my identity, necessarily subjective, through which I can I learn about myself. The things for me, while I am drawing them, are, above all, “possibilities”, “timely moments”, “right moments” of time, chances to inscribe me in the time (in the present, in fact here being for myself), without which (my) own experience of things would not be possible. If so, if time comes from my relationship with the object and, therefore, in this birth I assist to the constitution of an imminent temporality (where my experiences are inscribed or incorporate), then as a man, I depend entirely from that constitutive possibility of things. Drawing for me is the happy opportunity to find me with things and with the others; a draw is what stays: paradoxical witness of the relationship between two systems: Me and the World (which has features of both; an interface). “Paradoxical” because me and the World are one and the same thing, especially while drawing.
Fig. 1, 2: Workshop The Time and the Happening: Drawings as Artistic Interventions, Narni, Italy, 2011 (Intervention: Pedro António Janeiro (coord.), Jorge Cruz Pinto, Silvia Escamilla Amarillo, Marigrazia Leonardi, Hector Sanchez, Ivo Covaneiro (tutors); José Ferreira Crespo, Margarida Monteiro, Mariana Sempiterno, Mariana Rodrigues, Marta Dias, Inês Félix (FA/UTL Architecture students).
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Fig. 3: Workshop The Time and the Happening: Drawings as Artistic Interventions, Narni, Italy, 2011. (Intervention: Pedro António Janeiro (coord.), Jorge Cruz Pinto, Silvia Escamilla Amarillo, Marigrazia Leonardi, Hector Sanchez, Ivo Covaneiro (tutors); José Ferreira Crespo, Margarida Monteiro, Mariana Sempiterno, Mariana Rodrigues, Marta Dias, Inês Félix (FA/UTL Architecture students). Fig. 4, 5: Workshop The Time and the Happening: Drawings as Artistic Interventions, Narni, Italy, 2011. (Intervention: Pedro António Janeiro).
Fig. 6: Workshop The Time and the Happening: Drawings as Artistic Interventions, Narni, Italy, 2011. (Intervention: Pedro António Janeiro (coord.), Jorge Cruz Pinto, Silvia Escamilla Amarillo, Marigrazia Leonardi, Hector Sanchez, Ivo Covaneiro (tutors); José Ferreira Crespo, Margarida Monteiro, Mariana Sempiterno, Mariana Rodrigues, Marta Dias, Inês Félix (FA/UTL Architecture students). Fig. 7: Workshop The Time and the Happening: Drawings as Artistic Interventions, Narni, Italy, 2011. (Intervention: Ivo Covaneiro).
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Fig. 8, 9: Workshop The Time and the Happening: Drawings as Artistic Interventions, Narni, Italy, 2011. (Intervention: Inês Félix).
Fig. 10: Workshop The Time and the Happening: Drawings as Artistic Interventions, Narni, Italy, 2011. (Intervention: José Ferreira Crespo).
Fig. 11: Workshop The Time and the Happening: Drawings as Artistic Interventions, Narni, Italy, 2011. (Intervention: José Ferreira Crespo).
Fig. 12: Workshop The Time and the Happening: Drawings as Artistic Interventions, Narni, Italy, 2011. (Intervention: José Ferreira Crespo).
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Fig. 13, 14, 15: Workshop The Time and the Happening: Drawings as Artistic Interventions, Narni, Italy, 2011. (Interventions: Marta Dias; Mariana Sempiterno and Mariana Rodrigues; Margarida Monteiro).
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