Intervening Spaces examines the interconnectedness between bodies, time and space – the oscillating and at times political impact that occurs when bodies and space engage in non-conventional ways. Bodies intervene with space, creating place. Likewise, space can reconceptualise notions of the subject-body. Such respatialisation does not occur in a temporal vacuum. The moment can be more significant than a millennia in producing new ways to see corporeal connections with space. Drawing on theorists as diverse as Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lefebvre and Grosz, temporal and spatial dichotomies are dissolved, disrupted and interrupted via interventions—revealing new ways of inhabiting space. The volume crosses disciplines contributing to the fields of Sociology, Literature, Performance Arts, Visual Arts, Architecture and Urban Design.
Contributors are Burcu Baykan, Pelin Dursun Çebi, Michelle Collins, Christobel Kelly, Anthi Kosma, Ana Carolina Lima e Ferreira, Katerina Mojanchevska, Clementine Monro, Katsuhiko Muramoto, Nycole Prowse, Shelley Smith, Nicolai Steinø and İklim Topaloğlu.
Spacing by Trace: Four Events of an Out of Place Experience
Abstract
This chapter attempts to compose a collage between memories of events from a personal experience of the author and the references that other authors contribute to describe drawing as action, a ‘gesture’ through which the body externalises itself. Drawing is described as an action of coming-into-presence, which means presence before signification. It is also defined as a non-representative art where the form is not the traced figures but the body as a form by itself, the body as generator of space. Four short narratives are used in a phenomenological approximation to describe body from an inside point of view where spacing by trace is experienced. The act of making traces appears out of intimacy and exteriorises – through a dynamic and diagrammatic kind of writing – aspects of the abyss of oneself in a process where ‘every time is a singular time.’1 Drawings are ruins, testimonies of these moments, moulds of the gestures that traced them. The experience of drawing is also ‘an interior matter,’ an experience that disappears when the action stops and a performing art begins, which is always accompanied by images in ‘a phantasmatic dance.’2 If contemporary drawing is defined by Alain Badiou as a ‘description without a place,’3 this chapter looks forward by describing events where space is presented in its formation as an out of place description. ‘Out of place’ because drawing is not perceived or not concerned as a given, available or formed form. On the contrary, it is the gift, invention, uprising or the birth of form.