“What is home, for a nomad?” If we start from a familiarity we call home and fly away betraying it, we familiarize ourselves with others only to betray them again. This is a secretive book that not only tells and shows story but also makes the reader perform it as well.
This work is the semi-fictional biography of Farren Aleksander; composed, illustrated, and shaped in a certain way to convey the message that she has to disseminate to the world. Taking the form of an autobiography, she (Farren) would like to secretively share her confession on the subject of ‘love and betrayal’ and ‘self-revelation’ that she collects and extracts from her journey of living abroad.
The book is divided into two sections. The first one, bearing the first notion on betrayal, is read from the front to the back. The second section furthermore betrays the first notion by requiring the readers to turn the book upside down and read it back to the front. This also involves the act of tearing the upper layer of the page so as to reveal the writings underneath it. Through the many gestures and acts that the reader must perform to be able to read, and while reading, the book, the reader will not only read the text and look at the illustration on the subject of ‘love, betrayal, and self-revelation’, but also perform it themselves.
Fiorent Fernisia, b.1990, started practising site-writing during her MA Architectural History at the Bartlett, UCL, in 2015-2016. Her research interest lies in ‘architectural representation’ and the ways in which it is used to disseminate architectural ideas and stories. Currently she works as a Basic Studio Coordinator and one of the Architecture Theory lecturers at the Architecture Department of Universitas Pelita Harapan, Indonesia. She practices architecture with monokroma-architect.com and is involved in architecture book projects with OMAH-Library.com. She also partakes as a designer in some programs of, Drupadi.id, a performance art platform based in Jakarta and Bandung, Indonesia. This July 2019 upcoming project that she is working on is “Dua Manusia” (The Two Human Being), a theatrical performance based on an Indonesian 1978 classic novel by Jasso Winarto.
The work is an attempt to practice not only storytelling and storyshowing, but also storyperforming. It challenges the ways in which some certain sites, memories, and meanings could be manifested into spatial object and thus enabled them to be disseminated to wider audiences.
Kundera, Milan. 2009. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. France: Harper Pernnial Modern Classics.
Armand, Avianti. 2012. Arsitektur Yang Lain, Sebuah Kritik Arsitektur. Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka.
Ware, Chris. 2012. Building Stories. New York: Pantheon Books
