HYBRIDS
studio project-book
“EMBODIED MATERIALITY” Ugne Neveckaite
-“Kissing Architecture”, Sylvia Lavin.
The project “Embodied Materiality” investigates ambivalence of fabrics at play and its abilities to seek new tangible knowledge in architecture. Textile materiality is a sensing we interact with on a most personal level daily, yet its contingent fluid - liquid qualities still feel rather under disguise in the field of pre-defined and static. Stemming from Pipilotti Rist’s “Ever is overall” video installation, the 'Embodied Materiality' explores a moving body and its relation to a fabric, weighted and shaped by a body’s trajectory, forces of power and gravity. Working with fabric in layered modes of analogue and digital have allowed me to explore and reconstruct the chosen video fragment, intervening and 'stitching' the seams of the interstice. Constructed wearables are not adapted to a one specific body part nor a function but rather take on the fluid statelessness of the fabric, being able to interconnect and 'inhabit' various bodily features and their movements, taking the body as a site. It aims to question how and where the skins of our lived environment (being it body, clothing and building’s skin) meet and what happens at the points of breakage.
One minute site Starting from Pipilotti Rist’s “Ever is overall” (1997) video and Karl Schlögel’s “Hot places, cold places” text, it was an intuitive beginning of a one minute site. It seemed interesting to reconstruct the encounter which makes a “hot situation” in a non-place (wherever something is happening; maneuvering space, where decisions are set in motion; in-between place). As mentioned in Karl Schlögel’s text, historical imagination is a tool to bring back definite form into a fluid state once again in order to understand it. Within drawing the sequences of a movement from Pipilotti Rist’s “Ever is overall”, I attempted to make sense of how this movement was a catalyst in setting the place in motion.
Notes on non-places from Karl Schlögel’’s “Hot Places, Cold Places”
Week 5
Week 5
Week 5
Week 6-7
Jody Sperling performs Loie Fuller’s Time Lapse dance
Week 9
Le Lit de Cléopâtre, 1997 by Barbara Chase-Riboud at Giacometti Institute, Paris. Bronze and textile.
Referential surfaces Sculptural work, textile art and fashion design references have all molded and shaped my work. It is interesting to see how even in sculpted stone or metal, the textile materiality could be visualized, giving ways for fluid weightlessness to be felt. In Turiya Magadlela’s (1978) fabric pathworks, the stitched different pieces of nylon pantyhoses bring about the loaded connectivity of fabric and its gendered and social connotations, similarly as Pipilotti Rist’s “Ever is overall” video fragments, immersing a spectator inside of its world. In Barbara Chase-Riboud’s (1939) work, textile materiality and solid bronze seem to layer each other and intersect, in this way reminding of Hussein Chalayan’s fashion design, having hybrid qualities in the points of breakage.
The Burghers of Calais, 1886 by Auguste Rodin at Rodin Museum, Paris. Bronze.
Mashadi Would say Too, II, 2021 by Turiya Magadlela at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Pathcwork of nylon and cotton tights.
Modelling the fabric / Analogue and digital Drawing out movement sequences have led to experiments with fabrics, testing out the ways to shape and join the cut-outs. I have tried to balance the learned architectural knowledge of model-making and a need to explore unfamiliar textile design, allowing for it to direct me. First, a cotton-like thin fabric was soaked in starch (amidon) and then ironed wet in order to keep the rigidity. Once the pieces were fully dry, I started to join them to create spatial qualities. I used my hand as a holding column for modelling around and in doing so the body became a site, morphing the movements and fabric. The results of the physical modelling were later transfered to digital interface (3D photogrammetry) which acted out as a new mode for information extraction for wearables construction.
Modelling fabric Test No. 2
Week 11
Model transfered to the digital photogrammetry interface
Week 11
Model transfered to the digital photogrammetry interface
Week 11
Bjorn Berge’s “Three Skins” schemes
Textile vernacular architecture - The Khayma Bedouin tent
Model transfered to the digital photogrammetry interface
Week 11
The three skins It also is interesting to further investigate the connectedness of Bjorn Berge’s schemes of three skins of our lived environement (the body’s skin, clothing and the building’s climate screen), mobile architecture and fabrics: "Common to practical utopianism and mobile architecture is that they construct tangible serious yet not top-heavy paramenters/parasites for alternative habitats. In that sense, they are both light: like modern life generally they have moved beyond ideology, are fleeting, indicative and suggestive rather than normative or binding.<...> modern utopia does not feel the need to isolate itself from civil society and its emanicipatory tendencies." - from a "Parasite Paradise - A Manifesto for temporary architecture and urbanism" The final constructed wearable rejects pre-definition by function, yet it provides different ways to attach itself to a body and questions how and where the three skins collide and what happens at the points of breakage.