if you want to see some spaces and objects where I was involved
if you want to text me
if you want to check some formalities
– tom :)
if you want to see some spaces and objects where I was involved
if you want to text me
if you want to check some formalities
– tom :)
The Distance of the Earth
Architectural Design Research, 2024
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In a time of environmental destruction, biodiversity loss, and climate change, we tend to overlook things happening unintentionally next to us. In a culture and economy, dominated by neoliberal approaches, most things and beings outside the visual-pictorial world remain either as granted objects or as completely forgotten. Accidentally, filthy, and unwelcome in most places, dust troubles our perceptions of nature and how it is (re-)produced through the fetishistic dominance of the visual image.
My incipient travel brings me to Graz, reading “A Wild Thing” by Hilde Bouchez. The architectural exploration begins around an abandoned site directly within the urban context. On behalf of dust, the thesis follows the question of how spaces can be read like texts and how texts can be constructed like spaces. The main project becomes a situated writing with different real and not-so-real experiences, jumping between an allegorical space and the existing site in Graz. It attempts to develop an authentic representation within the debate about the dichotomy of nature/culture and dynamics of the Earth.
Based on the writing, a physical public intervention responds to the site as a performative space and invitation into our world full of tiny particles. A moment when in a darker void — music, other people, and from time to time a light beam — all intersect. At this exact moment, it might be a blur between artificial and natural. This muddled approach draws influence from performative writings of Jozef Wouters, dreamy links to Italo Calvino’s “The Distance of the Moon” and embodied writings of McKenzie Wark.
So, Krzkz starts travelling through the filthy outside and arrives at an abandoned landscape in a city full of dust. Krzkz closes her eyes and dreams about a new place.
Any light from the outside remains indirect. The installed materials will alter and grow over time as a result of human bodies and natural wind force.
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Location
Graz, Austria
Team
Tom Kohrs