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.