Cécile Martin

Architecture, care & dare

Architecture care & dare explores how a body connects to an environment, reacts to it, dwells in its perception. Capture the experience, as it is experienced, before it becomes conscious, when it is still at a subconscious level, when it is something that is happening to an individual. Before the mind controls, creates habits, values, imposes culture and decides to erase the bodily presence. Stay at the first level of embodiment. Proceed to the automatic recording of what comes forth.

This project intends to erase the gap in architecture between a knowledge-based practice imposing rules to action within a space, and the individuals’ experience of architecture. I wish to capture the sub-conscious act of inhabiting, the emergence of experience and of the imaginary in their capacity to act as gateways, as tools to bridge, to reconnect the human to the collective and individual empowerment. How does one reconnect people to their senses? In a timely experience, address empowerment, to show without saying but by making individuals experience in a seemingly banal action, make them perceive something they have never observed before.

Concordia will be the case study for the whole project, in the making and the exhibiting – addressing the space, with the people within.

1. The recording of an extensive encounter with their environment of a dozen individuals. Create a context of direct intimate experience of architecture, and document the moment.
2. A single self-contained, textured, multi-dimensional “narrative” blurring words, all recordings brought into a single composition.
3. an immersive physically-dedicated listening tool/set-up: the visitor puts on a headphone, to which is attached a frontal horizontal mirror so that he all at once sees himself, the space both behind the mirror and behind him. To and in front of this headgear + mirror is attached a full-length “horse-tail” hanging to the floor. The viewer’s relation to the environment is disrupted (a disturbance amplified by his movement) through the duplicity of his vision and shift of gravity, making perceptible, changing his subconscious relation to the environment. The visitor is transformed into a character: his perception leading his jerky actions in space, he becomes a performer.
4. a feedback process
   • a recording of the visitor’s use of the headphone is added to the previous soundtrack, live (which includes a spatial recording of the environment)
   • the object itself is not final. The user can modify it. Eventually the parts will disassemble and come together in another manner, for another use. Elements can be taken off or added to it. Maybe a set of various elements can be staged, spread around the room.

Andrew Forster

Cinéma

The Old Cinema
“Cinéma” was a performance which took place over three days in the space of the Société des art technologique (SAT). An audience seated indoors in theatre seating facing out through windows towards a public square watched a series of ambient actions repeated on varying cycles. These action were hardly discernable from the ‘normal’ events going on in the park (drug dealing, skate-boarding, hanging out): a man swept up garbage with a pan and broom; another arrived on a bicycle, locks it and runs away (repeats); another performer re-enacts the gestures of a Palestinian suicide bomber as he disarms himself at gunpoint; a musician plays kalimba on a bench, chatting with a policeman. Each night a sound mix was generated using material recorded in the park at other times, mixed with live material picked up in microphones in the park. The piece was often intervened upon, or completed, by actions of  the users of the park interacting with the performers, or the police arriving , for example. I have decided to re-score this piece and present it again using a similar apparatus in public space. The first version of the piece was so complex that I hardly had time to understand the rapid unfolding of events on each night. I learned much about the complex dynamics of performance in public space. This new version is a chance to take the piece further.

What to do In the Black Box
So the original ‘Cinema’ was a perceptual apparatus like a camera — a room opened towards the world through sound and light. Not only was the audience able to watch what was going on outside, they also heard a soundscape ‘pulled-in’ by microphones located in various places (on the musicians instrument, on the dust-pand of the sweeper). This was a live mix each night. So the box of the theatre is like a camera. It is a black box with an aperture out onto the public space. The new exploration that could be done in our underground black box is to think about ways, other than the visual, to sense and rebuild another space. If the black box has no window (as we know) how do we ‘see’ out. in this space how can we experience something happening elsewhere. This could be a live demonstration or simply us making a mock-up of what would be an audience experience. How could we ‘spatialize’ this intentionally neutral space.

Alice Jarry

Lighthouses [ working title]

I’ll be working on a series of early prototypes for a larger site specific installation called Lighthouses to be presented at Les Transnumériques Biennale (Belgium) this fall, within the context of MONS 2015 (European Capital of Culture). The experimentations will consist of dichroic glasses, stepper motors, light, smoke and various mechanical components. During this residency, I will work on creating color patterns, developing suspension methods, and I will explore emerging material properties such as glass resonance in order to see what these assemblages can activate within the space.