What is that we were worried about?

What is that we were worried about?

Bedir, M.
Ince, A.

Architecture and The Built Environment

Architectural Engineering +Technology

2014-12-31

“What is it that you were worried about” is an art video3 where an energy rebalancing coach heals and cleans the unsettling energies of spaces by putting them into a holographic energy scan. Two artists draw our attention to an old bunker in a Bosnian Town, which used to be Tito’s atomic bomb command. The bunker was recently repurposed to serve as a venue for art, however like in any conversion process the transformation of building out of its past traumas to an art center was not easy and required “cleaning/ confrontation”. In the art work, the two artists invite the coach to heal this vacant building. In contemporary urban context, there are many vacant spaces, creating absence of context and programme, failing to connect the elements of a city in a coherent way. They become ‘the mental exteriors in the physical interior of the city’. These voids in the city could be the results of fiscal policies or the city’s modernization, reconstruction and development mechanisms. Sometimes they appear simply because they fall outside of the urban environment’s functional and productive circles; while other times they are perceived as phenomena, which grow parallel to deindustrialization, suburbanization or shrinkage. Or like in the above-mentioned video, could be the result of a dictator’s fears. The particularity of vacancy is embedded in its specific context, history and culture.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2db2be8c-d6da-47f4-a990-21e206b76ced

Interartive, Special Issue 65: Culture + Urban Space

Institutional Repository

journal article

(c) 2014 The Author(s)