A Dialogic Approach to Urban Drifting

PhD STAGES:

Final and Other

EVALUATION STAGES:

Presentation / discussion and Selection

MATERIALS:

Abstract, Paper / artefact, and Poster

DISCIPLINES:

Architecture
Viktorija Bogdanova
Ilina Cvetkova

Files: abstract, posterfull paper

Fragments from proceedings (‘artefact submission’)’:

Abstract.

Collaborative poem-drawing is a verbal and meta-graphical expression of spatial thoughts and feelings. The works represent an unfinished dialogue of memories (and design dreams) that are related to a shared (and imagined) urban experience. They are fragile platforms of carefully layered traces of discussions between the two authors, from day to day. They are “remnants” of dialogues about places that are experienced (through derive sessions) or imagined (in design drawing sessions) not as entities outside ourselves, but between ourselves. As dialogic devices, these collaborative poem-drawings are bringing together two different ways of looking at the spatial reality, while avoiding closure of the finite meaning of the processed material.
Graphically representing the conceptual background of our desire: clouds of spatial amorphous envelopes (dreams and memories) are hovering above a semi-permeable membrane (our senses and our sensitivity to the given reality) laying upon vertical columns that rise from the “orthogonal” ground. These clouds are fragments of urban interpretations related to a specific place: their inscription into a format of collective poem-drawings represents the process of juxtaposition of the interpreted maps in scale (plans, photographs, sections) and their resonance in the present moment of re-creation of memory. They are a palimpsest of different degrees of reality: the tension between the Clouds of memory and the “Reality” in scale is what generates an abundance of meaning, each time a spatial memory is re-evoked into presence.

Finally, these collective poem-drawings are tools that aim to cultivate liberation from the Known in the present moment of inscription. The exhibition would include: 1.a discussion upon the artefacts (reflection on the process of making and reading the maps); 2.a collaborative drawing performance; 3.a (graphical and verbal) contextualization of the collective poem-drawing in the wider context of the PhD thesis. /…/

Keywords.

collective poem-drawing, dialogic, derive, urban interpretation, distortion of memories

/…/
Conclusion

Unlike the poem-drawings that are processual tools in a design task (few of them will be exhibited at the conference), the artifacts introduced in this sequence are flowers which sprouted from a trembling soil: without precise aspiration, without „why?‟ and „how?‟ and „what for?‟ They are there because they emerged as an urgent need to cultivate a spatial dialogue through means other than purely verbal meditations. Communicating in silence contributed to our thorough mutual understanding in relation to spatial doubts and questions. At the same time, we created a notation/artefact of that discussion that is transferable a wider range of indirect interlocutors.

The contribution to a collective learning environment, that such a research can bring, is the stimulation of the following points through search for order by the growth from the inside and releasing a particle of truth from the unrepeatable moment of creation: 1. learning to listen responsively (creative and critical compassion); 2. bringing a design decision / spatial judgement built upon such self-softening; 3. continuous recording and erasing of experienced spatial values: a simultaneous cultivation and destabilization of the value system, beyond any authority. /…/