Draw of a Drawing

Banou, Sophia

Abstract

Draw of a Drawing is a transcription of the installation Kaleidoscopic City (a survey of Edinburgh focused on the transitory elements of the urban). As such it marks the moment that the elements of the survey are projected upon a single surface. Understanding drawing as not only a representational artefact but as a distinct intertextual spatiality, it performs this material situation by expanding into 3D space. This move uncovers the process of drawing as a situated experience; where reading and writing the drawing are understood as immersive forms of inhabitation, and the interiority of architecture’s own codes of signification is revealed in a productive exchange with external notions of agency and convention.

Its dual expression as the enclosed space of a box and a continuous surface exemplifies the relationship between the spatial and the ‘superficial’ while the wood registers the negotiations that take place between sign and surface by reassigning signification to the effect of inscription. Draw of a Drawing thus not only re-presents but also enacts the gesture of drawing, considering architectural signification as a process of (re)configuring a space that is not other, but continuous to the locality of its physical instantiation.

Draw of a Drawing is therefore also a record of representational transactions. What has come to comprise it has been carried across a variety of localities or sites. From the city to the gallery, and to the interior of a wooden box, these re-sitings can be understood as a series of reterritorialisations, where the object of representation is not merely displaced but constantly recalibrated by the agency of new space(s). These ‘situations’ both material and immaterial are always enabled by a surface. Indexical, verbal and figural marks, are situated in the drawing but also place the drawing itself within a frame of ‘language’ while both the material expression of the box and the techniques of fabrication involved are equally formative of the final result.

As re-sitings become re-sightings, and even looking is performed as a surface-effect, the physical attachment to the site of installation facilitates the enactment of the drawing’s performativity. Installation thus takes on the form of drawing in space: of drawing out from the surface the space of representation in a choreography of manipulation.

Link to whole proceedings: http://dx.doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-8508

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 4th Forum Architekturwissenschaft
• Start Date: Nov 16, 2017
• End Date: Nov 18, 2017
• Acceptance Date: Apr 23, 2018
• Publication Date: Nov 20, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jul 8, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 4, 2021
• Pages: 182-191
• Series Title: Reihe Forum Architekturwissenschaft
• Book Title: Artefakte des Entwerfens
• ISBN: 9783798330900
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/6208970
• Publisher URL: https://architekturwissenschaft.net/Reihe/Forum_Band4_Banou.pdf