DISSONANT GEOMETRIES
ALICE’S RESEARCH SEMINAR
16.11.2022 (12.30-17.30) – ARSENIC, LAUSANNE
Organised by Tiphaine Abenia and Julien Lafontaine Carboni
With a collective dance improvisation led by Simon Henein and Joëlle Valterio and a lecture performed by Maria Auxiliadora Galvez Perez.
From Monge’s descriptive geometry to more advanced geometric modeling technologies, geometry has always been a companion to architecture, used as a powerful descriptive and communicational tool. In a context of development of integrated modeling strategies, such as BIM, geometry tends nevertheless to be reduced to its predictive capacity, gradually losing its fundamental role in understanding, organizing, interpreting, and imagining complex spatial conditions based on ecological relations between human, living and non-living bodies. This critical reduction amplifies the lack of attention to the embodied qualities of geometries and drawing, which requires us to investigate dissonant geometries understood as new material-semiotic nodes produced by conventions, able to grasp and activate new geometrical grammars and active potentialities.
This first seminar aims to explore geometry in its ability to remain and become a symbolic, material, transcendental, embodied, situated and far-from-neutral tool. How geometry could be reattuned to current architectural challenges and be re-oriented by dissonance? Can it still be engaged as a non-instrumental tool of discovery, as a poetic and critical site of resistance to reductionism? Could geometry in architecture be anexact (yet rigorous)? Could it support new coexistences with non-human ecologies ? How could we teach and research those new complexities through drawing ?
FROM MOVEMENT TO GESTURE
DANCE IMPROVISATION WORKSHOP
SIMON HENEIN & JOËLLE VALTERIO
(IMPROGINEERING + INSTANTLAB EPFL)
12:30 - ARSENIC (STUDIO 2)
This dance improvisation workshop explores the spectrum of body motion on stage, from movement to gesture. In dance, movement is generally seen as the displacement of the body segments through space; it is essentially a geometric and kinematic phenomenon. Gesture goes beyond: it is considered to be movement aiming at expressing (semiotic gestures), executing (ergotic gestures) or perceiving (epistemic gestures) something. Since both movement and gesture emanate from the body, the latter can be seen as the place where geometry meets meaning, emotion, action, etc. As Antonin Artaud puts it: “The important thing is to become aware of the localization of emotive thought. One means of recognition is effort or tension; and the same points which support physical effort are those which also support the emanation of emotive thought: they serve as a springboard for the emanation of a feeling.” *. Exploring these concepts through collective improvisation within performative settings reveals them to the eye and constitutes a step towards embodying them.
* A. Artaud (1938), Le théâtre et son double. (The Theater and Its Double, Grove Press, 1958, p. 138)
BIOGRAPHY
Simon Henein is Associate Professor in Microengineering at EPFL and Director of the Micromechanical and horological design laboratory (Instant-Lab) within the Institute of Mechanical Engineering. He is a recognized leader in the design of novel flexure-based mechanisms with sophisticated dynamic properties, dedicated to mechanical watches, surgical instruments, and aerospace applications. His related undergraduate and graduate project-based teachings focus on micromechanical design, with an emphasis on the creative process. In parallel, he developed a strong interest in improvised arts, particularly in dance instant composition. His experience in these two creative disciplines allowed him to identify a powerful synergy: improvisation as an efficient technique for developing collective work approaches, reflexivity, situated knowledge and embodied cognition. In 2017 he launched a course entitled “IMPROGINEERING - Collective creation: improvised arts and engineering" within EPFL's Social and Human Sciences Program. In 2020- 2021 he was Visiting Professor at the Centre for Theatre Studies (CET), Faculty of Arts, University of Lausanne.
LINKS
https://instantlab.epfl.ch/improgineering
https://www.epfl.ch/labs/instantlab/ascopet
Contact: simon.henein@epfl.ch
With the support of the ARSENIC theater: https://arsenic.ch
Photo credits: Nora Roth
YOUR ANIMAL BODY: FIGURES FOR SOMATIC ARCHITECTURE
LECTURE
MARIA AUXILIADORA GALVEZ PEREZ (PSAAP(L))
15:00 - ARSENIC (MINILABO)
Dissident movements of bodies are often interpreted as animal ones. When this happens bodies are more prone to be dismissed and marginalized. In this lecture we will use these eccentric movements and positions as places for somatic discoveries. Places of knowledge about ecologies of intimacy in the More- Than-Human-World. Rising from this awareness dissident geometries emerge for architecture. Geometries of desire in between materials, living organisms and meteorologies. A Somatic Architecture where bodies are their environments.
BIOGRAPHY
Since 2016, she directs the “Platform of Somatic for Architecture and Landscape” (PSAAP) and its associated Laboratory (LSAAP). PSAAP develops research and projects of Architecture, Art and Landscape. Between 2006 and 2010 she has been Coordinator for Panama in the International Cooperation Program of Social Housing developed by the Andalucian Government. In 2002 she was selected for the 8th Venice Architecture Biennale and in 2018 her work was part again of the material selected for the Spanish Pavilion at the 16a Biennale. Her work has been published, among others, in “Natural Artificial” by EXIT.LMI, in the journals UHF, BAUWELT, Summa+, 2G, Deutsche Bauzeitung, Arquitectura Viva or in the monography “Excepto 21. Gálvez+Wieczorek”. She is author of the book “Espacio Somático. Cuerpos Múltiples” (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2019) and “Descampados. Caminar los paisajes revolucionarios en la ciudad somática” (Ediciones Asimétricas 2022)
As researcher, she has been part in between others of the Scientific Committee of the Congress “Middle-Class Housing in Perspective: From Post-war Construction to Post-millennial Urban Landscape” celebrated in Italy in 2012, or co-director of “We Are All able Bodies. From Sensory Deprivation to Sensory Augmentation” celebrated in Spain in 2018 thanks to the support of the International Ambiances Network. As performer she has developed happenings and installations in between others in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, in the Angewandte in Vienna or in the Art Gallery Nieves Fernández. Nowadays she works in Landscape, Art, Performance and Architecture from an embodied point of view and researches the possibilities of movement and cognition in the pedagogy and development of these disciplines developing a “Somatic Architecture”.
LINKS
www.psaap.com
CONTACT
Tiphaine Abenia
tiphaine.abenia@epfl.ch
Julien Lafontaine Carboni
julien.lafontainecarboni@epfl.ch