Robert Beson: "You are not in control"

You are not in Control

Robert Beson is an Architect working at Grimshaw, Sydney. A graduate of the Master of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney, Robert was awarded the Byera Hadley Traveling scholarship for research on fabrication and production of complex structures, conducted at the Zurich office of Design to Production, Switzerland. Robert has taught architectural design as well as advanced modeling at UTS, the University of Sydney, and the University of Newcastle. Robert has acted as art director and curator for academic institutions (University of Technology and University of Sydney) and is the principal of AR-MA, an architectural design and consulting firm focused on conceptual design, fabrication and assembly.

DISPLACE: "A desire for control"

Displace, 2011 performance &  installation,  50 Kensingtom St Chippendale Sydney

Robert Beson: "Displace" is about a few things, but mostly it’s about control. It started from an invitation by David Burns, Sam Spurr and Adrian Lahoud to produce a script and performance for the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. Initially it was a response to a poster that showed a container ship that had come aground on a sand-bar, leaning on its side. The heading read, “You are not in control.” The work, itself, is made up of 1000 laser-cut cardboard templates folded into bricks, each hung with two wires from an overhead frame. In the centre of the explosion hangs a person. Together, the person and the wall made of bricks form a system. The system is then subjected to an explosion. Displace attempts to control the explosion – one of the least controllable events I could imagine. So at its most superficial level, it investigates a desire for control within an uncontrollable event.

Let me now qualify this by saying that an explosion, itself, is a completely controlled event. I say this because, once the explosion is put into motion, its course as an event is completely mapped. Were it possible to re-run the same explosion multiple times, that is, with the same starting conditions and the same objects, we would find that the individual movements of the objects would vary, but the overall result would be the same – a level of displacement. It is the objects, caught up in an event that is of a completely different scale, that are without control. Perhaps it is the life of the objects, including in this case people, who are caught up within the explosion that interest me; what, if any, agency do they have in the face of this uncontrollable event? 

And so we created an explosion; we froze it, and then we built it; again an act of control. This is not the work of an artist, especially not the work of a sculptor. This is very much a work of architecture. Each of the 1000 bricks is placed exactly where it’s supposed to be. We produced documents that described the position of each object in relation to every other object. We went to painstaking lengths to ensure millimetre accuracy. We intervened in the event and we controlled it. 

Assembly drawing for Displace installation

At second glance, however, the whole project undermines its own argument. For example, we step in and freeze the explosion – an act of control – so that the project can argue, through the explosion, for its liberation. The explosion is a loosening and a breaking of existing relationships. In this case, it is simply the relationship between the bricks in the wall and the passer-by. It argues for a catastrophic reconfiguring of the architectural project – historically, that of the controlled assembly of discrete objects into a coherent, tectonically meaningful whole. This requires letting go completely, exploding the current system and its discrete, unitised relationships. To do this, we have to relinquish control.
  

Assembly drawing detail  for Displace installation

I say this with a tinge of irony because the process of making Displace required a week’s worth of work from a team of eight people, each obsessively following a plan. We measured out kilometres of wire, each cut to a specific length and labelled to correspond with a particular brick. Each brick was laser-cut and labelled and then threaded with two wires before being hung from the frame. Control requires effort. It also requires optimism, and I think that it’s an optimistic project, albeit one without a conclusion. In the end, we are caught between the system and its complete atomisation into non-related parts.

Website: http://www.ar-ma.net    contact: robert.beson@ar-ma.ne

* All text + images supplied by Robert Beson.

Fischer & el Sani: Berlin based multi-media Artists

Spelling Dystopia 2008/9, exhibition view, Galerie Eigen + Art, Leipzig 
HD,16:9, 2 channel video installation, colour, stereo,17:25 min

With their work Fischer & el Sani focus on transitory spaces and vacuum situations in urban environments, collective memory and vision in various media such as film, video, installation and photography. They critically reflect the rise and fall of modernity, the intense and uncanny relationship between our contemporary society and utopian projects that have driven the evolution of our history, from the past to the future, or the anachronistic merging of both ends. Their work is a permanent pursuit of and negotiation with the transition of time.

Nina Fischer / Maroan el Sani have been working together in Berlin since 1993. From 2007 until 2010 they have been working as Associate Professors for Film and Media Art at Sapporo City University, Japan. They have been the recipient of the Karl-Hofer-Prize of the University of the Arts, Berlin and were awarded several artist in residence stipends e.g. at German Academy Villa Massimo, Rome, DAAD in Tokyo, Cité des Arts in Paris and at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Artist website: www.fischerelsani.net  Gallery contact: http://www.eigen-art.com/

INTERVIEW

AC: How do you use Film as a medium to discuss notions of architecture and the memories held within a certain building?
N & M: History manifests itself in the diversity of architecture from different epochs. A building is a visible remnant and a piece of memory of a certain time. Our work is a permanent pursuit of and negotiation with the transition of time, or the transition of epochs. We explore the historic traces of urban landmarks, monuments and events that embody such a transition. As with many of our previous projects, we ask with our new film project Spelling Dystopia how memory operates, how a site wears its history, both physically and metaphorically.

We are interested how cinema has an impact on locations. It changes the perception of a place and causes a shift in collective memory.With Spelling Dystopia we focus on the public perception of the uninhabited island Hashima near Nagasaki, which has a vivid history. In the year 2000 it became the film location of a science fiction blockbuster Battle Royale, and came back into the Japanese consciousness, with a different connotation. The younger generation started to know the place mostly from movies, mangas and video games, as an abandoned ghost island.

Spelling Dystopia, 
(production still)

Through these images the island appears almost as a fantasy, an imaginary playground where various images and layers of reality and fiction already got in a state on mingling. 

Aided by its appearance in Battle Royale the island has since taken on a ghostly, mythic status in the national imagination, a fictionalized shift in collective memory.



Spelling Dystopia
(production still) 



Memory changes with the media that is produced at these places. By producing a new artwork about a place like Hashima island, we are not only bringing memory back to the contemporary stream of media consumption, but also influence how it will be remembered in the future. By the format of a film installation, that uses several screens, we try to create a new approach for the way to watch it.  The viewer can switch between parallel time and story streams, depending on his own knowledge, associations and imagination, and finally add this new image to his own memory.

Spelling Dystopia / Iwa:Rock
Colour print, Diasec, 70 x 115 cm, 2009



Spelling Dystopia 
exhibition view, Kunsthaus Glarus 2009 


AC: What do you see is the potential for Film + Architecture as an expanded field of Architectural activities?

N & M: In Film, Architecture often tries to look real, and is obviously fake, but the other way round, cities also start building fake architecture. We saw a lot in Asia. It is like Disneyland in the city, and has the effect, that, if you have a visitor from Japan for example, strolling together through Berlin or Leipzig, they always ask you: Is this building real? And most of the time, you are pretty sure about the "realness", but some of them have been reconstructed after the war, or after the wall came down, and sometimes, architects might have cheated a bit, or a lot, building it "after old plans" like for Hotel Adlon or some of the historical buildings that have been "reconstructed with modern techniques and elements...."

AC: You discuss "the complex relationship between the visual language of a building, its psychological effects and the political-economic reality in which it functions" in relation to your piece "The Rise" ?  How could the link between architectural space and film space inform the critical revision of spatial thinking and spatial intelligence? 

 N & M: Yes for The Rise, it is about the relationship between buildings and their psychological effect. We refer to Anthony Vidler "Über das Unbehagen in der modernen Architektur". There are many films also that are based on this effect, like Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and also recent films that play in the modern environment of empty office cities by night. The house, which usually should be shelter, often becomes a frightening place, like a prison.



The Rise,
HD / 35 mm, 16:9,17 min.,loop,colour,Dolby Digital, 2007

 When we prepared The Rise, we had a look at the etchings of Piranesi, where he shows the endless stairs, that never bring you up to the top, and stories like the "Baobab" from Luis Borges, where a chameleon like shadow follows everyone, who climbs up the stairs of a tower, and it always falls back to the bottom, when they arrive on top. This was a Malaysian tale.

With our film work The Rise we show the uncanny, the unforeseen, which lurks directly under the glossy surface of the modern environment. This fear is also visible in the new architecture itself. It is a global, universal phenomena. The security has risen a lot since 9/11, and has a direct influence on the city development and design of public space in contemporary architecture. That has also an effect on the users of the spaces. 



The Rise

(film still)



AC: How can knowledge of filmic space be used to rethink the way in which architecture deals with spatial sequence and spatial narrative in cities?

N & M: The knowledge can be used in different ways. When I think of architecture in films, it is often shown in a way to criticize the situation, like in the Truman Show, where the guy lives in this gated community like place, which also imprisons him, and on the top, it is all fake, people act in loops and it takes him years to find out about it, because it is so close to what really happens in our society everyday. I think architects should consider architecture in films more often as warnings!

Of course there is also the opposite position. Architectural design in films has often inspired. When we think of early James Bond movies, with the film sets and futuristic houses like in Moonraker build by Ken Adam, that we saw in our childhood, this has certainly had an effect on contemporary architecture. 

If you think of spatial sequence and spatial narratives in cities, there are other elements coming into play too, like history, memory, and environment, even "actors".
Fischer & el Sani are currently showing a new exhibition in Rome, "Empire of the Signs" .

Refer to gallery website for more info: http://www.galleriamlf.com/ 

* All images sourced from http://www.fischerelsani.net/ 

Many thanks to the artists Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani for participating in this research.

Christophe Gérard: "Film + Architecture"

Christophe Gérard, "Annotations" (film still) UK, 2001, 35mm, B&W, 14 minutes
Image source: Criticalspace 

Christophe Gérard is the founding director of Criticalspace, an academic specialist on the subject of film+architecture, an architect, a filmmaker and highly experienced scenographer of ground breaking, critically acclaimed and extremely popular exhibitions including Bruce Nauman: A Retrospective (1998), Sonic Boom (2000), Eyes, Lies & Illusions (2004), held at the Hayward Gallery. The work he has done as a director has been shown in a long list of festivals around the world and has had theatre release in the UK. Since 2000, Christophe teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is currently working on a feature film, on a second animation short and is developing an exhibition which draws on his extensive practical knowledge of the media of film, architecture and scenography.

AC: How would you define Film + architecture as a discipline?
CG: As a discipline between two disciplines and a discipline of the in-between. It deals with the pollution, the contamination of each discipline, film and architecture, by the other. It looks at the way architectural-space and film-space collide, inform and reconfigure one another.

AC: There is a minority group of formally trained architects who operate as film-makers and set designers . What has this got to say about the future role/potential of the Architect?

CG: I cannot speak for others, but it is undeniable that we are living in a world of media where the reality of architecture seems to lay increasingly in its image than rather than its physicality. As architects we cannot ignore this phenomena...

AC: How do you as a practitioner move between these disciplines?

CG: With difficulties. Commissioners in each discipline are naturally nervous at the idea of someone working in between two disciplines. So my work tends to be, at times, purely architectural, at others, purely filmic. Having said that, I have a filmic approach to architecture and an architectural approach to film - my knowledge in one domain enriches the other. There are also projects like exhibition scenographies which are entirely about the mise-en-scene of space and people experiencing space.

AC: What do you see is the potential for Film + Architecture as an expanded field of Architectural activities?

CG: Are we talking of films in architecture, architecture in films or this grey area where film and architecture blur, which all are very distinct subjects? Each are already expanded field of architectural activities, but they are, by no means, the reserved domain of architects.

AC: How could the link between architectural space and film space inform the critical revision of spatial thinking and spatial intelligence? 

CG: Baudrillard reminds us that architecture is not what fills the space but what generates it. And space is ultimately generated in our mind : it is a combination of our perception, our experience of space, altered or pondered by such things as our personal knowledge, memory and our state of mind… The real space, like the filmic space you reconfigure in your mind from irreconcilable snippets, different view points, is ultimately a mental space! That is where film and architecture meet up, where film in generating space, in a sense, becomes architecture, and again why as architects we have to look into films. 

AC: There is an obvious relationship b/w- the temporary nature of architectural exhibits and the techniques and materiality of film set construction. How do you think these qualities might translate to more enduring spatial conditions in architecture, beyond just the superficial level of Props and Special effects?

CG: Architecture is extremely ephemeral. I find reassuring that the life expectancy of a building is getting shorter, that architects have to think about degradation and recycling. But the décor has many other qualities which translate well into architecture, amongst which the fact it is built to support and provoke the action whilst remaining unnoticed – to be both present and absent at the same time. The décor is built for the event. The décor, unlike its definition would lead us to understand, uses an economy of means.

AC: How can "film as a medium develop the conception (both the mental picture and the act of conceiving) of architecture?" I am referencing part of the SG 1 Film and Architecture programme description that you are involved with at The Bartlett, Faculty of the built Environment, UK.

CG: Film provides a very rich representation of architecture. The filmic space confronts us with specific aspects of physical space that as architects we are contributing to (and physical space has to be taken here in its broadest meaning : the sensorial space, the social space… etc). In film, space is experienced through sounds, motions and e-motions, and we comprehend its invisible boundaries. Film is therefore a good material of study to expand our understanding of architecture and change the way we go about making it.

AC: How can this knowledge be used to rethink the way in which architecture deals with spatial sequence and spatial narrative in cities?

CG: I feel the subject goes far beyond sequences and narratives, which are two concepts that architects like to toy with. What about a phenomena like adaptation, appropriation, blurring and time? What about acknowledging that film has shaped the way we relate to architecture - Mr M., for example, age 35, living in a block of flats in Paris, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, describes the courtyard in reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window? Understanding what is at play in architecture is the first step in rethinking it. 

Many thanks to Christophe Gerard for participating in this research project.