Giulia

My research starts from my interest of investigating how people inhabit the space -especially the public one- and go deeper on the curious relationships we have with the everyday elements that surrounds us.

The spaces that habitually surround us and in which we weave our relationships seem to have a need of limits and boundaries. The places in which we live are constantly imposed on us: every sign, indication and image that marks the urban landscape leads us to obey to its distances, directions and adapt our physical as well as mental movements to these. How to find our own way to inhabit the space? How can we start perceiving the (public) space (and its elements) in a different way?

Space understood as a source of relationships is increasingly being lost over time and public space has lost the characters and traits of creative action, as well as possible acts of appropriation.

I started my research looking at my room here in Eindhoven. I tried to analyze it and de-construct it to get the main elements, synthetized them and then work with analogies:
- elevated position
- you can climb it
- poles/walls to protect and support

01.1 LIVING STRUCTURES

Some references to structures that resemble public scaffolds but used in a private way:
Abitacolo is a scaffolding for children to create a place where they can organize their own space, to invent a domestic playground in an aim to transform the quotidian reality of childhood.
The Living Structures of Ken Isaacs -handmade, knock-down, multifunctional furniture and architectural units- challenged ideas of how the public could sit, work, and live within their own homes and the broader built
environment.
The Cavart Research Group's Culturally Impossible Architectures seminar, July 1975, Padua, where artists, architects and students gathered to conceive and build a temporary archaic and futurist city.

02 THE PRIVATE AND THE PUBLIC

Ugo La Pietra, in his direct interventions in the urban environment, photographed a series of urban equipment, familiar to all, and which remind us every day of the constraints, obstacles,separateness and violence of the city. So he redesigned them by distorting their purpose: from structures serving the city to structures serving domestic space. The attempt is to rebuild -like an anthropologist - a relationship with the elements around us, in a playful but also more aware way, to pay attention to the affordances of the objects and to their potential. Is a good method to raise awareness towards the meaning of the elements in public spaces, to create new visions of things.

03 SCAFFOLD AS A SAFE PLACE

Research continues with the intuition of shifting from private to public, that is to say involving vulnerability and privacy.
Come to my mind The House With The Ocean View performance by Marina Abramovic, perhaps the most representative experiment in personal purification through restrictions in the private/public space (that by the way looks like scaffolding). An attempt to shift both her own energy field and the audience’s, to change through body and objects, the behaviour of the people and the perception of the space.In this experiment, she had no privacy, she had no escape.
That's what we usually experiment when shifting private and public, especially when it comes to eating (in public), that is such an intimate gesture.

To scaffold means also to provide support for. Objects have a life too. This is why, even in the context of a dinner, is possible to individualize (other shapes of) scaffold already present in the dinner space that can be used to display and serve food, to inhabit the space, sit or eat on it.
I am analyzing scaffold as a "supporting structure that bears, sustains, props, holds up, elevate, encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace", as Celine Condorelli states in her book and conversation about Support Structures. I intend scaffold as the element which "assists corroborates, advocates, articulates, substantiates, champions, and endorses; for what stands behind, underpins, frames, presents, maintains, and strengthens."
I am trying to restore attention to the affordances of everyday objects, to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world. I am trying to de-construct the standardized idea of scaffold we have in our minds and to create new ones, based on the basic principles of a common one (elevating, supporting, climbing..).

05 SCAFFOLD AS A TEMPORARY TOOL

06 SCAFFOLD AND MORE THAN HUMAN

The scaffold is always a metaphore to talk about something else. As conceptual signifier, I think scaffolding can offer an example of new relational possibilities of a more-than human politics for cities that currently exist, and for those yet to come. New ways of thinking about human and non-human entanglements in cities opens up possibilities for diverse imaginings of human-nature.

As a simple technology, scaffold invites us to better understand our connection with structures (also I think structures could have a healing quality, or they must have a healing quality in the future). Scaffold in made from earth, we rip it off the earth, mining. Scaffold is "rooted" and built in the earth crust as a form of architecture, it becomes part of it.
Can scaffold question our relationship with the soil, with the ground, with the earth?

07 SCAFFOLD AS A HETEROTOPY FOR LIMINALITY

I think scaffold have still a lot to tell us. It proposes a new definition of what "alternative" or "other space" might be (it is also a precarious structure, temporary), not only physically, but also experimenting with new spaces (physical and mental) to construct alternative narratives, a "place" with new ways for humans to attune to each other, to their surroundings but mostly to themselves.
This refers to the notion of Heterotopy by Foucault. I am intending scaffold as a heterotopy for liminality, of threshold. A network at once open and bounded, letting in and out, complex place, structure reduced to the essential, kind of negative architecture that thinks through subtraction.
Scaffold as an element that diverts the way for passersby who, when coming across it, have to find their own way around it, since it changes the perception of the space, it breaks the pattern of straight lines.To questions its own in-betweenness, the space between “what was” and “what will be” and how it fits within the world around it, the scaffold as an heterotopia of liminality, as a totem and anti-totem, as a space that exists and doesn't exist at the same time, also because of its temporality.

08 TO FEEL THE SPACE

How can a material space stimulate other embodiments or interactions? Sensing the world, objects around us, the space, the outside, starts from sensing the body.

Inhabiting a space means being present in our bodies.
During a workshop, I came across Huddle, the performance by Simone Forti and I immediately had the vision of the body itself as a scaffold. Then I read a poem by Sophie Collins who was describing scaffolds as "barely indipendent structres". Everything is connected. The power of these bodies, the tension in their arms and legs, everything was reminding me of a alive supporting structure. And this was the moment I thought that we have to transform in order to feel the status of things. So I did.

03.1 HOW TO USE A SCAFFOLD IN A DINNER - POST PARANOIA PERFORMATIVE DINNER

We live in standardized spaces where our relationships to objects is barely there. We should make an attempt to bring back a certain attunement with the things that surround our bodies in the public space, how some of them influences our fears, how some of them can help overcome them.

If you remove something from the context of its everyday environment, does it still exists as intended or does it become something else entirely? What kind of different life this object can have?
What if using a scaffold -in the context of a performative dinner that tries to overcome the feeling of paranoia- to recreate a private space where people can eat like nobody is whatching them?
Following the steps of location privacy through "camouflage", I wrote a recipe that step by step guides you introducing the item of the scaffold in a dinner. You just need a tipical transparent plastic curtain used in construction sites to cover the structure partly and giving the feeling of being protected with the opaque effect of the plastic texture. Guests are prompted to participate with the object of scaffold and to interact with it: near/inside the scaffold you can serve some guilty pleasure food so that people can enjoy it inside the scaffold and eat wildly.

final set up with some of the scaffolds as supporting structures used for the perfomative dinner

Scaffold has the particularity of being temporary.
Scaffold is a temporary support structure/, system, used mainly for works related with houses, to build houses, to restore them or to sustain them from collapsing. And then we remove them. This is why I intend scaffold as a tool, a simple technology, instrument used in order to make something else.

05.1 CAN SCAFFOLD UNDERLINE THE BACKGROUND OF THINGS?

Can, then, scaffold become a way to narrate the background of things, the labour behind them? The scaffold as metaphor, a claim to investigate the act of seeing beyond mere mechanical function. Scaffolds can speak for safety, protection, and security. Can speak as a reminder, talking about the condition of production, that nothing of this (buildings and the creation of the "city" in general today) can happen without an incredible amount of people working together to make it possible on a very phisical and city level, talks about collaboration, the collective endeavor.

08.1 MY BODY IS A SCAFFOLD

Furthermore, the way we eat in public is not always the same way we would eat in private and it's interesting to see the behaviour of people and the social aspect when shifting to private/public. Eating is such an deeply personal gesture that includes privacy and vulnerability, fear of dining or dinner conversations.
Especially in this performative dinner, where all the event will be recorded and livestreamed, inhabiting the scaffold is a good solution to overcome the paranoia. To analyze the space and found spots where people can't see us. How can I alter my position with in this public videostreamed space? How can I feel comfortable in this space? Can this "impossible architecture" actually create a real space for discussion?

In public spaces we are constantly controlled and -if not by the gaze of people- we are tracked, watched, recorded by cameras and technologies. We have become conditioned to be suspicious of public spaces, and that is where the paranoia feeling stems from sometimes.
What happens if we shift an element from the public space -the scaffold- and we try to trust it, to experiment it as a private space where there is no surveillance but more privacy, where feeling safe, and overcoming the feeling of paranoia?
How to escape the feeling of paranoia through architecture and simple technology like scaffolding? Can scaffolds become a way of dwelling?
Can we trust scaffolds?

set up of the scaffold in the "Post Paranoia Dinner"

Same process, for example, when cooking: we use tools from the kitchen and then we just wash and get rid of them. Aldo Giannotti, for instance, is using a scaffolding structure in order to constrain/help people to see closer some drawings that are too high and small on the walls to notice from downstairs.

+ ZOOM IN TO READ THE RECIPE +

What happens if we stop thinking the scaffold as something added, detached from nature but rather made of the same substaince of the earth?
What happens if we start thinking the scaffolding as an extension of the earth's crust, not an isolated object but linked to the earth and people, to our energy, our presence in the space and therefore it is grounded firmly?

Start to think as scaffold as something that allows us to get closer to the more than human (earth maybe?), in a way we have to invent a new form of technology and new form of architecture that let us realize that we live the same life as all other species (*Emanuele Coccia, interview).

Rarely independent structure, more than human almost in a spectral sense, it invites us to create a deep (and playful) relationship with the elements around us, raise awareness towards the meaning (and the aliveness) of the elements in public spaces, create new visions.
As the individual parts of scaffolding are joined by solid joints to other pieces, we too -in the same way that the natural world also functions- are a large ecosystem, interconnected and interdependent network.

Supports, elevates, heterotopy for liminality, boundary space, temporary, open, working by subtraction, the essential, anti-totem, dangerous, safe, invisible, present, public concept as much as private, shelter, body

7.1 SCAFFOLD AS A PORTICO

08.2 REFLECTIVE AUDIO

It is the invisible that maintains the rest. An element of transition from space to space, a permeable device indicating lines of border. Thresholds are placed with multiple intentions. On the one hand their function is to complete one phase of a movement, and on the other to open up to a new phase of action and challenges which need to prepared for. Scaffold as an heterotopy for liminality tries to make the invisible a bit more visible, to look for absences in everydaylife, for encounters of the more than human.
Can scaffold, as an heterotopy for liminality, be a tool for architectural choreography? The inside and the outside, both sides being elaborately separated as well as connected by means of form and material. Can it give form to the various gestures of slowing one's tempo when discovering an architectural place?

The scaffold reminds me of the portico. A privileged vantage point because it is the remains of a subtraction, and because it grasps a range of spatial, social, and symbolic functions that are the essential resilience for "home-making." An opening-closing space, a zone of resistance to exogenous and endogenous forces, an area of adaptation and regeneration, a neutral space, the portico -the scaffold- is no longer and not yet home, but it provides an exemplary representation of home understood as a process. Scaffold is heterotopy for liminality, the entrance space, space of preparation, of encounter, introduction, the proscenium of a house.

I started to embody the element of the scaffold, focusing on the pressure and the sustain that it exerts. I could really feel the material, the vibrations, the tension and the pressure starting from my hands, then in my arms and in my whole body. Could really feel my bones, my muscles.
Changing our bodies is changing how do we experience the world. Body is usually described to talk about the central part of something, but body can be everything else. What all the meanings do share in the sense that the body is a boundary that delimits qualities, persons, ideas, substances...?

At this point I wanted to gradually shift from the materiality of the object, toward the embodiement of the scaffold.

I wanted to interpret and work with voice/language, space, body and (absent) object, shifting from a larger scale (outside, intending the scaffold as a heterotopia for liminality in the space ) to a smaller scale (inside, *simone forti*bruce nauman , emboding the scaffold), to create kind of a praise to our bodies as everyday scaffolds.
To create a space with ways for humans to attune to each other, to their surroundings but mostly to themselves, to their bodies, understanding their bodies as scaffolds.

How does the perception of space, working with the body in space and language can change our making in the world? How can we be more present in the space, be attuned with the elements aroud us and learn how to read the space?

Aa a supporting structure and as a heterotopy for liminality, scaffold works with outside and inside, with public and private. Same we do with our bodies. If the body is the liminal space, what is the inside? The mind? What is the outside? The space, the others? Intending the body as the space of threshold, a structure for liminality.
How do we keep our bodies as a liminal space? How not to separate body and mind? The liminal space is supposed to be safe, but is our body always a safe space? Do we really own our bodies?
We -scaffolds and bodies- are barely indipendent structures, we are all part of a huge ecosystem and network. When associating the structure to the body, it may sounds as a fixed structure, but what keeps us moving are joints, that can transform the geography of a space and can let our structure assemble and move in the space.

Support, I think, allows us to think through an equalizing movement, and this is perhaps its most important aspect. What I mean by this is that support is a carrier for inter-dependency as a form of reequalization. In an evocative exploration of the relationships between objects, movement and words, the body as a scaffold is shifting shapes, opening up bigger questions that reach beyond the purely physical. Far from the materiality of the scaffold, structure and body are removed from their everyday context to become a tool to explore wider questions about being and sensing the world.

I will try to use words in movements in a listening dialogue to my performative words, to almost build a vocabulary of text and movement about scaffold and body. The practice of doing, the embodied production.