all watched over
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All Watched Over is a camouflaged interior as an impulsing artifact of data and images cultivated by the political exiles. The interior readapts the theatre and parliament typologies to exchange and circulate visual and linguistic elements in the digital age, while the exterior envelope employs strategies to trick the surveillance gaze for granting digital anonymity.
With the spread of surveillance technologies human to human vision transforms into machine-to-machine vision, resulting in great control for repressive. It is alarming since media is the commodity that regulates our social interactions. The skin color, gestures, sexual orientation, and protest movements are recorded in public spaces against communities. Under the light of discriminatory body politics, we trace an intellectual flow of academics, writers, poets, playwrights, artists, and activists from east to west, specifically from Middle Eastern countries to three large capitals London, Paris, and Berlin. Berlin is unique for attracting most of the flow. In the 30 km north of Berlin, an underground bunker is occasionally occupied in a dense forest. The project extends the bunker into a repository of counter-narratives hosting the individuals whose lives revolve around producing political commentaries and threatened because of this fact.
There are two different cycles within spaces. Data management and theatre feed each other through debates and curatorial practices. The first cycle happens permanently. The artists,
journalists, and researchers reside shortly and produce together in the debate chambers. The data is transformed into virtual spectacles on the second cycle to meet with the people out of this seclusion. The happenings are temporary at particular times. The theatre is physical, and the medium is virtual. It is a wild electronic data landscape of the fiction and inhabited stories.
The interior is lightly covered by the veil of anonymity that blurs and pixelates. The power of the digital age is to be able to be invisible, going off the grid. The veil is doing that by creating a fuzzy appearance of bodies. Another type of camouflage, like the bunker, hides from the camera lens, making undetectable.
To sum up, the building emerges in the shadows of the decaying nuclear bunker in Berlin, becomes an optical and political apparatus inhabited by liberated bodies, as a result, creating the intimate landscapes of reflections and playful spectacles.
https://vimeo.com/user76375617
To wander in this cloud is to encounter different narratives
continuously as the shared experience. The field keeps unfolding with
surprising moments created by layered transparencies, multiplied
focuses, and
softly expanded the visual field. To sum up, the building emerges in the
shadows of the decaying nuclear bunker, becomes an optical and
political apparatus inhabited by liberated bodies, as a result, creating the intimate
landscapes of reflections and playful spectacles.
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pixel factory
Pixel Factory is a secret camouflaged interior, an impulsing artifact of data and images, and a mediatheque that we can act as scriptwriters while expanding physical bodies onto virtual. The main aim is to adapt architecture to the technological age as an electronic media suite in times physical nature is inseparable from the digital wilderness. Architecture becomes a visual and political apparatus inhabited by political bodies whose primary medium of resistance is cultural and intellectual property against the despotic digital regimes.
The exterior veil is a fragmented, dynamic visual camouflage apparatus that blurs inside and outside, fooling the physical and digital eye. The mutualistic relation and collisions between informal data stewardship by data sleepers and spectacles by objective dreamers are central resources of community synergy. The data management, learning, and theatre feed each other
through debates in the salon-like chambers leading to curatorial practices. The physical bodies expand to digital bodies through media extensions in the electronic landscape, while all practices happen with different rhythms cycles, and rituals, expanding physical onto virtual.
to bloom to glow to march
As Ranciere points out in the book Politics of Aesthetics (2015), what is possible to see and hear, to say and think, to do and make is usually destined by exclusionary politics. This forms the conditions of inclusion or exclusion of a community. Pata-Rat is the house of socially, environmentally, culturally segregated Roma Community. Therefore, to bloom, to glow, to march aims to rethink of Romani festivals as instant visibility and exchange tool for Pata-Rat to fight against the systematic invisibility of this community, while improving the living conditions on-site.
The project proposes a series of festival artifacts that serve for the yearly ritual of celebrating spring, then re-placed in the settlement to serve the daily rituals. During the summer of celebrations, collected water is cultivating herbs and flowers for Ederlezi rituals. [TO BLOOM]. The fountain, the feast, the fire hill, and shelter are built by fabrics and inflatables that are playing with degrees of transparency and light conditions [TO GLOW].
The artifacts travel, opens up in festival during summer spectacles on the hill, and when in the settlement during winter, it is covered with additional layers for protection, creating the shelter. By the movement and evolution of artifacts, it is a ritualized way of negotiating the space. This new definition of festival architecture is learning from Romani festival rituals’ spatial implications, challenging the idea of permanency and ephemerality while combining the spectacle and practicality. The final move [TOMARCH] is marching back to the city, imagined as the Romani parade. They carry artifacts that are blooming and glowing, therefore transforming the festival artifacts into the community’s self-representation, to an exchange tool to foster conversation. Through this joyful march, they are taking their rights back by celebrating the protest to reclaim their space in the city.
Fourth Nature
Fourth Nature is an architectural and landscape strategy that challenges the standard methods of flood management and occupation of cities with rising water levels. The strategy focuses on establishing new territories between land, water, and inhabitable learning spaces across both river banks of the city Stein, near Krems an der Donau.
The ambition is to create educational spaces that would facilitate a more homogenous layering of the three stratas that constitute Stein; the old city, the water, and the natural tree landscape. In order to facilitate this mediation, our research is carried out under two parameters, first an understanding of how to channel the water, in order to work with the force of the water and not merely to create structures that would act as a shield against it. Second, the establishment of new ground, that would allow the creation of a new dynamic landscape, that is created by the new sediment collected through the placement of a series of obstacles, or inhabitable spaces.
Different parameters control these obstacles or the architectural form, such as curvature and orientation, dictating the placement and production of different layers of our intervention within the landscape.
Where some act as windbreakers, others allow vegetation to build up, and the rest as water collectors. Thus, by controlling the architectural form and the stages of implementation on site, allowing the sediment buildup and its consolidation within the force of the water in order to produce a new holistic relationship between architecture and landscape.
In terms of the program, the newly established relationship acts as a variety of different atmospheres dictated by the newly developed fourth nature spaces, where the user has the complete autonomy to dictate their own use of these ephemeral, atmospheric and naturally controlled spaces, thus challenging the concept of institutionalized learning.
Teamwork with Mira Al-Suradi
