Deviated Histories

To operate as a critical space, a place of rupture to free ourselves from a preconceived and therefore reductive language. To invest in an idiosyncratic puzzle of part-ideas within a space of concentrated interiority; the space of a severed head. The very idea of this writing - beyond its projected content - is to operate as signs symbolizing the object in the absence of the object. For all we know; the space of the severed head has never been and only exists as symbol. The Lacanian interpretation of absence assumes that there cannot be absence in an objective world for absence can only exist through symbolic or representative means. Hence the importance of representation (in our case drawing) to explore this quality that there may be a presence where there isn’t one. We ask ourselves; how do we deviate from projected outcomes, from annotated histories. How do we break a history of drawing in order to come to understand that very history of drawing more curiously? We see this as the only way in, succumbing our post-modern complex, of history to be irreversible, so we called into being a particular drawing protocol. The monolith drawing synchronises analogue thinking with computational developments to enter history through our intriguing capacity to long-long-for. Longing stands for the experience of something that is absent. To sustain this longing as an architectural quality it is thus important to design architecture that sustains a kind of absence. We do this on multiple levels; our drawing protocol instils a mode of creating space through the act of subtracting mass from a predefined lithic core. As such, space is always created by means of two intersecting volumes, the continuing tale of stereotomy signifying the dialectical opposition between structure and ‘revêtement’ (ornamentation). The avoidance of drawing lines directly is also part of a strategy to surpass the presence of the a-priori image and thus break the path of ‘self-projection’. In such a way that The Monolith Drawing can reveal something beyond personal imagination and allow a working with time through time. In line with Merleau-Ponty’s description ‘figured philosophy of vision’ through which he describes how the position and the act of looking is included within the drawing, we perceive The Monolith as that which looks at all things but can also look at itself. It sees itself seeing making The Monolith and the severed head an expression of 'Dasein', which is not so much about a material separation (subtraction / decapitation) as it is about an inquiry in its own history, being in the world (looking inwards and outwards simultaneously). Our drawings exist as a present-day reading (machine) yet constituted by the idea of a living past.status: publishe