Poetic Corners
From Modernist Spaces to Homecomings
A seminar with Alice Gavin, Elia Ntaousani, Stephan Trüby, and a performance by Elizabeth Guthrie
Elizabeth Guthrie, Dub-Notes (extract)

In conjunction with the exhibition Cornered Rooms: Facing In – Facing Out, Waterside Project Space is hosting a seminar to discuss contemporary architectural philosophy within the context of the exhibition.

The event will explore the concept of corners through the inherent relationship between literature and space. The authored creation of space in literature affects our response to the characters. By placing characters in one space or another, the author elicits a range of reactions, depending on our real experience of the space described; we come to understand fiction within spatial terms. The language we use to describe space likewise characterizes our perception of it. The space we describe becomes individual and lived, no longer an anonymous space, but a personalized place. It is the connotations of the language we use that characterizes space – and place – in poetic terms.

The participants will relate their own research to the poetic understanding of space and the spatial understanding of poetry, charting the interconnected nature of these relationships from Modernism to contemporary concerns in architecture.

Moderated by Annabelle von Girsewald

Saturday, 16 October 2010

Seminar starts 4pm
Performance by Elizabeth Guthrie starts 6pm
The gallery will be open until 9pm

Cornered Rooms runs until 17 October

Elizabeth Guthrie will perform Dub-Notes – to Refrain (from Condition). The performance explores the superimposition of the psyche onto the walls of the gallery, the dreamscape of the dislocated voice within a room.

Stephan Trüby is an architect, writer and curator and author of the book Exit Architecture: Design between War and Peace. In the book, he outlines a philosophy of ‘exit architecture’, a concept central to the thematic conception of Cornered Rooms. In the seminar, Trüby will discuss ‘exit architecture’, as well as how the corner is presented in “The Poetics of a Wall Projection” by Jan Turnovsky.

Alice Gavin’s research at the London Consortium engages with issues of opacity and transparency in both architecture and literature in the Modernist period, drawing also on the idea of the ‘gaze’ in its theoretical aspect. Gavin’s presentation for this seminar will discuss how Samuel Beckett and his contemporaries install characters in tight corners, both architecturally and ontologically.

Elia Ntaousani is an architect and philosopher. She is particularly interested in the global / mondial debate, in the concepts of altermodernity and hyperculturality, in gender discourse and in cultural mobilities. Ntaousani’s current research at the London Consortium, which she will discuss in the seminar, seeks to explore the contemporary synesthesia of Homecoming in current state of increasingly interpenetrating societies and to open up a dialogue between homeland and homepage, alterity and foreignness.

The seminar is supported by The London Consortium. We would like to thank the participants and Steve Connor. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Mr James Ellery and Wonder.
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