Sweet Memory
A metaphysical re-membraning of the limit
S.I. Ghigliani (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
R.R.J. van de Pas – Mentor (TU Delft - History, Form & Aesthetics)
R.R. van den Ban – Mentor (TU Delft - Teachers of Practice / AE+T)
Stavros Kousoulas – Mentor (TU Delft - Theory, Territories & Transitions)
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Abstract
This work is a call for attunement and sensibilization. There cannot be attunement and an enhanced sensibility without an investment of time, energy, and attention. As a response against scientifization, binary distinctions and taxonomies of othering that dominate and reinforce colonial impositions, this research insists on an engagement with complexity, disorder and contamination, understanding space and time as active relational fields that are non-homogenous but dependant on a point of view and a problematic field, and thereby challenging binary dialectics that rely on simple yes or no answers, taxonomies and an essential objectiveness.
Design is a field of operations that concern themselves with the manipulation of limits and constraints. To understand the limit as the manner of relating is to understand it as a methodology. How to relate organism and environment is the gist of technology and design; then the question of the limit becomes, by definition, the question of the method. Rather than a typological approach, this research adopts a topological one, challenging stable typologies such as the prison, the dwelling, the hospital and the laboratory through their iterative modulations across time.
A methodology is not preexisting to the research nor this research output; instead, I allowed myself to switch methodologies, and I encouraged contamination, engaging in a process of complexity that I now understand as not only responding to my motivating concerns but also as an approach to design. I sought to embed myself in complexity as much as possible, taking the experiment as the technique and unpacking these device-machines of measurement to question them as the method for the understanding of our world.
The design project develops as a genealogical design exercise, asking myself what could have happened instead of what did, recognising virtual memory as affectual and multivergencies as compossible and worlding. Set within the Argentinian context, conditions of extreme scarcity are understood not as lack but as productive, collectivising and creative forces, welcoming contingent ideas and problem-creative solutions.
A contaminated methodology, in research and design, is thus not a metaphor but an actual letting go of the obsession with procedure and control to allow the difference to creep in, and, with it, allow new and fascinating encounters.