Tenna Doktor Olsen Tvedebrink & Tina Vestermann Olsen
Simon Morris, Gill Partington & Adam Smyth (editors)
Edward Hollis & Rita Alaoui
Max Olof Carlsson Wisotsky
The Death of the Chemist: Installation (2016) springs from a longstanding interest in Jane Rendell`s method of site-writing and her definition of critical spatial practice. She considers the critical practices in spatial, temporal and social ways, which I build upon as I engage with the architectural history of the building in question. I consider the story about the chemist`s death in a spatial way, where finding the exact location of the accident is of importance. For Rendell ‘writing a site’ can ‘challenge criticism as a static point of view, located in the here and now.’ In my work, the difficulties I face when encountering archival material and building, as I attempt to find the exact location of the accident, is emphasised in other to questions the positionality of the historian. The spaces where encounters with works take place, and the way we talk about them, are of critical potential to Rendell, as she argues how the ‘critic encounters with the work influences the process of criticism.’ Our movement through the building, captured by audio and reintroduced into the building, depicts a historian who faces uncertainty. The project spans from 2 February 1926 to 23 May 1926, and again 2 February 2016 and 23-26 May 2016, accentuating the temporalities at play in history: the way I follow and come after Norberg-Schulz, or the way he never met his father, who died month before he was born.
Beyond the specific work in question, I have specifically explored the critical and spatial potential of the essay form in film and writing through a focus on the key terms framing, mobility and self-reflection, in my genre invention the fenestral essay film.
1. Jane Rendell, ‘A Place Between Art, Architecture and Critical Theory’, Proceedings to Place and Location (Tallinn, Estonia, 2003) 221-33; Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: the architecture of art criticism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010) 193.
2. Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: a place between (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006). 192.
3. Rendell, Site-Writing, 18.
4. Rendell, Site-Writing, 12.
5. Anna Ulrikke Andersen, ‘Ten Windows Following Christian Norberg-Schulz: framing, mobility and self-reflection explored through the fenestral essay film’, PhD Thesis in Architectural Design, the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, 2018.
Photolanguage (Nigel Green & Robin Wilson)
Emma Cocker & Clare Thornton
Catalina Pollak Williamson / Public Interventions