Material Orbit – Material Desires

Finding ways to look for material literacy outside of architecture

It’s a good friend’s birthday today and I am sitting at a big table laden with birthday presents and cake. I’m introduced by Jana to a whole bunch of people; my conversation sticks to two women sitting opposite me. Alex is a fashion designer and visual artist, Yana is an interior designer, artist and set designer and as we talk, we realize that we are all interested in the performative potential of material that either interacts with humans or more-than-humans. Yana is currently working on the project HYBRIS in collaboration with the Fraunhofer-Institute, where they are collaboratively trying to develop a binder compatible with mealworms’ faeces to create an innovative insulating material for the building industry. In Yana’s work, the mealworms eat Styropur, creating new shapes that constitute Yana’s artwork. When Yana started the artwork and experimenting with the mealworm, she thought about how the mealworms’ faeces could be used once they have finished their performance with the material. Similar to Yana, Alex also works with someone who performs with material. I learn that in Alex’s work is particularly focused on the material’s performance, more specifically how it responds to the dancers in her collective performance group, called Go Plastic Company.

Listening to these two inspiring women confirms a gut feeling I had already while making the ship model; that I need to look at other disciplines outside of architecture to learn what other ways one can engage with material and what material can reveal in human and non-human bodies. Through the conversation with Alex, I have come to the conclusion that I need to engage with textiles to understand what it is that material triggers in bodies. I hope this excursion in other arts than architecture will give me new insights into how material is understood and communicated in order to apply it to the architectural design process.

Screenshot from reel/advertisement by @go_plastic_company Nov 4th, costumes by Alexandra Börner, accessed on Nov 9th 2022, Screenshot: Mara Trübenbach

This is why the second chapter of my dissertation shifts from contemporary architectural practice, i.e. model making, to the performing arts. It consists of an introduction, three sociological-phenomenological analyses of artistic creative processes combined each with an interview/conversation with the artists, and a conclusion. The focus is on the “site of mediation and projection of material” that is mutually dependent with knowledge (Bruno, 2020). It is a two-folded operation, looking at the rituals (process) on the one hand and the surfaces (visuals) on the other. Through three mini case studies, formally not working in the field of architecture but have ways of working that I feel are useful to this project. I open up to disciplines other than architecture and hope to learn about the use of material (especially textiles) in their practice. I don’t claim that this information should be incorporated into performance studies, but I try to borrow from such to apply to architecture. This allows to highlight hierarchies of voices (that do not dominate the architectural part) and tries to show different expertise and perspectives in the field of research on material in architecture. The themes of hypermobility, migration and displacement are components of two of the three cases, raising the question of whether the material can focus on the trajectories of figures traditionally thought to have only a peripheral impact on the design of the work, i.e., to “draw[s] (…) attention to several other such parallel phenomena, such as plays that cannot be performed and architecture whose sole beauty lies in the blueprint” (Monga, 2018).

The aim is to trace the concrete encounters of material and human in processes of design, use and interpretation (Escher, Tessa, Zahner, 2021). In doing so, I want to accept the material’s invitation to follow its social strands in an unbiased way (ANT) by perceiving the sensual and visual experience and the performative responses to the material in the creative process.

Installation ‘Textile Territories’ by Judith Raum exhibited at Bauhaus Dessau, Photo: Judith Raum

The first case study focuses on artist and researcher Judith Raum and her work Textile territories, which explores Bauhaus weaver Otti Berger and Raum’s approach to artistic research that uses (re)weaving of textile samples to recreate a thread from the archive for a broader audience interested in art and design. The way the material is used in her practice is to go back into the past and bring out hidden personal stories in order to rewrite historiography. I follow Raum’s approach to understand what is in the process of her artistic research and what knowledge about Otti Berger’s work and personality is revealed through re-making and thus understanding material.

The second case study follows the insight into an artistic process of the performance collective Go Plastic Company, which consists of a textile design artist, dancers, choreographers and filmmakers. Fashion designers are often sensitive to the properties of textiles and how they can be performative. Unlike architecture, performance is a crucial part of the fashion design curriculum. Here, students learn how textile respond to (non)human encounters. In GoPlastic’s work, they experiment how to embody and express emotions through the use of textiles and bodies. The focus is on the performance of materials – it determines the movement of the body: " After all, the motion of an emotion can itself be drafted onto the surface, in the shape of a line or in the haptic thickness of pigment, and it can be tracked down with tracking shots” (Bruno, 2018).

The last case is an example of inviting to an audience experience. It does something different from the first two and leads to the importance of the visual experience of material that also came out in the previous case study of model maker Ellie Sampson. The contemplative work Infini-18 by scenographer and theatre maker Jozef Wouters is a piece without human actors and an example of how the material is an actor in the architectural environment. “Infini” is French and describes a painted scene that unfolds the space from a central perspective. It aims to go beyond the theatre and its set, and to stimulate the audience’s imagination. Stories about landscapes are told through the visual engagement with textiles, which is explored in this section. What does the audience associate with material? What creates empathy? Can material be understood without haptics? This case study considers unexpected extensions of the material world embedded in a digital and visual world. Assuming the material is in the realm of the visual – is this realm different from the haptic? What would this mean for architecture? There is something that can only happen live, an atmosphere, a performance created and reproduced by the actors and the audience. How does the material on stage carry and convey what the audience receives and sends back?

Material Desires

Material, Body and Movement

Research Progress