Respondent: Hilde Bouchez
Language: English
PhD Advisor: Loove Broms and Minna Räsänen
Note!
Please register for the seminar here: forms.gle/Q92MokrbEkxAnPW49
Links for zoom and PhD material are at the end of the registration form.
PhD Working Title
Transmundane Architecture: Architectural Control Relationships through the Lens of More-than-Human Onto-Epistemologies, Degrowth Practices and Occulture
Seminar Title
It’s all about Control
Seminar Question
Is there any space for nonhuman agency in architectural production? Architecture is control and control opposes agency.
Abstract
The thesis is centered around the construction of a single building. It is seen as a method or process – not a solution – to explore the main theme of this thesis. The construction of the building allows to zoom in on architectural human-nonhuman control relationships, a “friction zone” which, during the thesis, turned out to be a fundamental stumbling block for a decentering of the human in architectural design. The thesis is contextualized through the fields of posthumanism and occulture and uses degrowth-thinking as a backdrop for explorations. The thesis tries to reveal or propose ways of architectural perception, which are alien to the normative rational architectural discourse, through the use of occultural cosmologies, fund in Theosophy, esoteric Buddhism or magic. In the thesis, different scales of human-nonhuman control relationships are visited – societal, site-specific, energetic, individual, poetic, irrational and abstract – in order to create textual, artistic and architectural fragments, which create a poetic knowledge field for reflection and contemplation, rather than a single answer. While the physical building is transitioning from an abstract idea to a concrete structure, during the succession of the pages in this book, the theory is becoming more abstract and more ephemeral: a transition from the physical to the metaphysical, from the mundane to the transmundane and back.
Parts from the PhD book as a preparation for the seminar
See link to registration form (for internal use only: please do not share, parts of the text are in the process of publication).
Sebastian Gatz is an architect, artist and trained car mechanic, who works at the intersection of art, architecture and technology. Currently he is doing a PhD in Fine Arts at Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. His research combines ficto-critical and posthuman methods to explore human-nature-technology relationships. He has an interest in experimental metaphysics, degrowth practices and digital fabrication. Previously he worked and taught at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) in Copenhagen, where he worked with Artificial Intelligence, Robotic Fabrication and Robot-Plant-Hybrids.
Hilde Bouchez, PhD teaches and researches within the field of applied arts, design & interior architecture, with a focus on responsibility and awareness, and a direct link with ways of storytelling as generators of meaning. In the past she was initiator of the FabLab and Innovation Hub Buda (Kortrijk), design manager for Proud Europe, a co-design platform. Was editor in chief of the magazines BEople and A Magazine, and has been curating several international exhibitions on design (MARTa Herford, Design Miami, Design museum Gent, Broelmuseum Kortrijk). In 2017 she published A Wild Thing. Essays on things, nearness and love, APE. With this collection of philosophical texts, she is a voice within the ontological turn: looking into a new understanding of the relationship between the human and the non-human. Proposing ways in giving agency to the man-made and thus questioning the role and perception of everyday objects in transitional times. Currently she’s teaching the Interior Architecture masterstudio: On Continuity and Identity and is involved in the linked research group at KULeuven. For the School of Arts Ghent she runs an artistic minor, based on her book, Wild Things.