by Joana Tomé
Abstract:
It is proposed, from the analysis of Caixa para Guardar o Vazio by Fernanda Fragateiro, a scrutiny of the haptic as a feminist strategy of reading from, and concerning, architectural space. Situating the work between sculpture and architecture, the connections it establishes with the latter are deepened. The haptic is defined, from its genesis in Riegl to its Deleuzian inflection, taking up again from Giuliana Bruno what links it to a feminine space par excellence. In counterpoint with a classical perceptual model, we look at the haptic as central to a feminist architectural space in which tangibility, wandering, habitability, and the social function of architecture are privileged.
Keywords: Fernanda Fragateiro, haptic, feminist architecture, space, body, Gilles Deleuze, Rosalind Krauss, Luce Irigaray, Giuliana Bruno, Debora Fausch
Introdução
Introduction
This article attempts to scrutinize the notion of haptic in the context of the analysis of Caixa para Guardar o Vazio (2005), by Fernanda Fragateiro (Montijo, 1962), as a proposal for a habitable space where the "neutral" and "universal" panoptic male architectural gaze is stripped of its tight grip on architectural thought and practice. That will open the way to a materialist conception of architectural space and, consequently, to a feminist experience of it [1]. The haptic, a feminine space par excellence, will find an echo in a feminist conception of architectural practice, conceiving architectural space as not neutral but inevitably permeable to sexual difference. Thought of, in the present article, as the ultimate proposal for feminist haptic architecture,Caixa para Guardar o Vazio will present itself as a practical possibility, a space-visual assemblage in movement: a passage from the optical to the haptic, from the gaze to the body.
1. between Sculpture and Architecture
Caixa para Guardar o Vazio (Figure 1) is part of the prolific opening of artistic and conceptual possibilities that the theorization of sculpture in the expanded field led to by Rosalind Krauss (Krauss, 1984: 31-42). Originally published in 1979, this seminal essay finally emancipates the sculpture from the impasse to which it had been voted by modernism. Reducing it to the sum of the negative terms non-landscape and non-architecture, modernity had pushed it into pure negativity, transforming it into a kind of ontological absence: the field of sculpture was defined through an antagonistic combination of exclusions, pointing to what was in the landscape but was not landscape, and to what was in the architectural space but was not architecture. Krauss was, instead, claiming a historically situated category, matching architecture to non-landscape and landscape to non-architecture, thus converting sculpture into a logically expanded field. Such an implication, therefore, re-equated the terms landscape and architecture in a reciprocal relationship with sculpture.
Caixa para Guardar o Vazio walks, therefore, between sculpture and architecture: it exists in an immeasurable haptic space of possible sculptural combinations between architecture and non-architecture, and that is also where the relevance of this work's approach in the context of architectural discourses and practices converges.
2. The haptic perception of space
"Haptic", from a Greek etymological root, refers to a being capable of coming into contact. It is as touch – a function of the skin –, the reciprocal connection between subject and surrounding environment. The notion has its genesis in Alois Riegl, to reformulate spatiality in art theory, significantly influencing Walter Benjamin, who adapts it to a subversion of the hierarchical relationship between touch and sight. The term comes to occupy a central place in the analysis that Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 603-635) dedicate to the Smooth Space, of haptic contours, and the Striated Space, linked to the optical [2], departing from Benjamin in the understanding of the haptic and optical as not dichotomously opposed but in reciprocal and constant contamination.
A measure of our tactile apprehension of space, the haptic allows the eye to connect to a function beyond opticality, expressed, in Caixa, in an effective – and affective – intervention in the material space of architecture. Using means traditionally alien to sculpture, which are the logics of architectural construction and scale, the work summons up a necessary character of habitability through the use of mirrors, which place the subject virtually inside the space, and wood construction that places him materially inside the work (Figure 1). Rodin's fetishization of the sculptural object – now something that can be appropriated – through the annulment of the plinth and, consequently, the desecration of the work, allowed the sculpture to be freed from the solemnity in which it was classically imprisoned and now to exist close to the spectator. Starting from this modern postulate that opens the way to immersion with the work, Fragateiro conceives a spectator who is allowed, more than looking at the work from all angles, to inhabit it through his own body, in a haptic exploration of sculpture in its architectural inflection and the consequent blurring of the boundaries between the two fields and plastic registers.
3. The haptic as a space in movement, of feminine contours
It is in the context of a haptic agent in the formation of material and cultural space, that Giuliana Bruno, in her essay Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (Bruno, 2007), brings back the haptic in the art to the picturesque. Because It privileges, not an aesthetic of distance, but a feeling through the eye, the pictorial Garden and the Picturesque had been vehicles for a walk in the face of the haptic image and imagination and, precisely for this reason, privileged places for female wandering, until then forbidden to women. On the way to a tactile vision of space, we are offered, in the haptic, a heterogeneous space composed of moving centers. There, a complex system of perspective lines is drawn that invoke the accumulation of views of a moving eye, as if narrativizing the architecture through the paths and movements of a viewer situated inside (Figure 2).
The haptic thus proposes a radical transgression of the classical perspicacious model that from early on imposed a violent ordering of the female body – not only through the Western compulsion for a renunciation of matter but through the imposition of barriers, conventions, poses and perspective on a body that, because otherness in itself, presented a threat to the order of the same [3]. This classical understanding of the mechanisms and logic of the gaze started from the Albertinian metaphor of painting as an open window to the world, making use of perceptual tools that allowed to pass, with precision, from the real to the space of representation, as is evident in Dürer's perceptual grid (Figure 3). There, through geometry and perspective, regulatory disciplines of an illusionist art (painting, in its Albertinian pretension), one looks at and apprehends a woman, lying down as an object to be studied, abundant with curves and wavy lines, facing a man, seated in a composed manner, surrounded by sharp, vertical, phallic shapes.
4. From materiality in the relationship between body and space
The empire of this scopophilic male gaze (considered "neutral" and "universal") shows itself, in Luce Irigaray's view, to be a symptom of a Western culture dominated by a logic in which the gaze [4], the fetishization of vision, prevails (Irigaray, 1985). An eye is accommodated, unified, and immobile. It takes us back to the illusions created by the perspicacious space of painting [5], in which the image is directed from a single and essential spatial point to another, from which the gaze departs, interpellating a spectator without a body: an idealized and sovereign gaze, successively considered male. Space exists, in this conception, homogeneous and impermeable as if facing the body and, as such, irremediably disconnected from it.
Western culture's obsession with the sublimation of matter inevitably permeates architecture, mirroring a challenging relationship with the materiality of the female body, historically thought to be on a par. Vision – considered the least corporeal of the senses – also becomes the first sense and metaphor for thought, showing the remnants of the Enlightenment heritage that looked to light as the ultimate image of the faculty of reason, and consequently imposing an inexorable separation between vision and body. Modernity and post-modernity, too, with their distinct innovations in technological capabilities that drastically transformed the relationship between space and time, further exacerbated this sense of corporeal sublimation that converges on the ideal of the disembodied subject.
In counterpoint, one reads The Knowledge of the Body and the Presence of History – Towards a Feminist Architecture, by Debora Fausch (Fausch, 1996), defending a feminist architecture as a way of strategically linked to the apprehension and understanding of space through a necessary sensorial experience beyond vision. The body, thought of as an indispensable instrument in the relationship between subject and architecture, is conceptualized in a framework that is far removed from a classical understanding of architecture in which the reading of architectural space would be done in terms of sequence, seeking and foreseeing connections and contrasts. It is in the context of a feminist architecture that a reading of Caixa para Guardar o Vazio seems to be useful, moving away from the classic understanding of spatiality as a being before, in which the spectator is passively placed, and approaching it as an incitement to enter the space in a work that is tangible (Figure 4).
A construction without beginning or end, it transmutes itself - guided by the democratic fruition of the work - through an infinity of spatial possibilities, from the cube of wood panels closed in on itself (Figure 5) to a metamorphosis of plural entrances. Openings and mobile modules are passages for exploration and literal transformation of space precisely because they are shown to be devices that imply use and dwelling – imply body –, and, from multiple points of contact, as multiple as the bodies that inhabit them, the work opens to the outside and allows the latter to take possession of it (Figure 6). Mechanisms that make it metamorphose in space and grow multiply; the interior and exterior are complexified and multiplied, and the entrances themselves are no longer clear – non overlapping the others (Figure 7). The wood of the construction and the cotton carpet installed on the floor open to touch, the mirror affirms itself as a spatial possibility; one creates relationships between reality, and virtuality is an extension of space that is simultaneously real and virtual. The angles of vision are multiplied, proposing a space where the eye acquires a haptic function, not convoking the classic model of static and absolute vision. Fragateiro proposes a space as a possibility, as experience; vision does not dominate, it is rather refused in favor of a sensibility based on nomadism, a privileged agent of haptic perception.
5. From feminist haptic architecture
Modern architecture, with its characteristic emphasis on reflection on construction and materials, seemed to have come close to this desire for tangibility [6] but had moved away from a feminist, haptic architecture because of the absolute primacy it offered to vision and self-referentiality. Modern tangibility was thus sought to be perceived exclusively through vision. The use of the body to grasp meaning would then be merely a tool for self-referentiality of construction – remember Le Corbusier's promenade architecturale [7], an archetype of the modern experience of architectural space, where a uniform and linear space-time pushes the observer to a moving but disembodied contemplation. ​​A Cartesian rational space is built there, based on the implacable distinction between mind and body, later extremized in the post-modern spatio-temporal quasi-imateriality.
Facing these experiences in the architectural space that encompass in themselves the hegemonic narratives of the body and the subject (this one, continuously masculine), another collective history is built from the margins - alive in the spaces of a haptic, feminist architecture. Thinking of the haptic in the context of a feminist architecture allows the formulation, and effectual construction, of a distinct type of spatiality and, necessarily, of a reciprocal relationship between it and the subject. Caixa para Guardar o Vazio expresses this same ultimate concern as the work's performative character. It drives the spectator's interaction with it and his or her corporeal experience (Figure 8), intensifying the body's experience as a physical place where aesthetic operations are established.
Space of wandering – inhabitable, traversable, tangible, transformable by the passage of the body – is conceived, remembering Bruno's theorization, "engagement with environmental history and its inhabited, lived space" (Bruno, 2007: 16). A haptic feminist architecture is the possibility of movement from the margins: metaphysical margins, of the subject's positioning; and physical margins, of the position that the periphery occupies in the urban space. This is how we postulate a space as practice, a dynamic architecture, based on the rhythmic possibilities of experiences, far removed from tectonic and fixed constructions. The physical experience of space as being inside/involved/embedded subverts the mind/body, reason/matter, form/signified dichotomies, replacing them by a corporeal, embodied signification; a feminist subject is produced there whose strategy will be the embodiment of knowledge.
Fernanda Fragateiro annuls, in this sense, the dichotomies interior/exterior, public/private, finite/infinite, opening the city's fabric to a feminine subjectivity that one constructs by building space within a space - with its plural possibilities of opening and closing over spatial reality. To Enter the Caixa para Guardar o Vazio is to no longer see it, to be too close, making the classic mechanisms and perspectival logics impossible; it is to lose oneself in a Deleuzian flat space, with no place for perspective or center, where the horizon, the background, the limit, the outline, and the intermediate distance is diluted, thus calling for the imperative physical entry into the work, reinventing the multiplicity of experiences and trajectories of the subject in space. It is ultimately reciprocal contamination: "the physical self occupying narrativized space, who leaves traces of her history on the wall" (Bruno, 2007: 65).
Conclusion
Building a connection between haptics and female architectural space is both a genealogical endeavor of moving exploration of space and a vindication of the social role of architecture as an instrument of social and political transformation. The haptic, conceivable in the material field of architecture as a free traversal of space, allows a radically feminist architecture to embody a female subjectivity. There, a female spectator, mobile, effectively and affectively inside the work - as opposed to a passive, contemplative, static, fixed gaze, disembodied observer – finally knows space, despite the historical restrictions to her movement, still expressed in violence and the absence of women's right to the city.
The notion of feminist architecture is also reflected, in this sense, in Fernanda Fragateiro's work, as an understanding of architecture as informed by its social context and by practices founded on notions of collaboration and cooperation, going against the disclaimer about the social consequences of the architect's work - so common in the understanding of architecture as an individual action and distant from both its social role and the manual work that sustains it. A political art par excellence because it sets world views and shared values in the public domain, architectural practice does not exist disconnected from the world, it establishes relations, more or less evident, with the social and cultural dynamics of the context in which it is inserted; it is there that lies its immense potential for transforming the material reality of the subjects.
The materialization of an alternative to a classic monocular and panoptic model, in which the perspective was disconnected from the body, and which has been permeating the Western understanding of space and architecture, ultimately opens up the possibility of a feminine wandering, embodied in the space of architecture and urban space, expressing new spatial-visualities and experiences from architectural configurations. Being architecture a structure - physical but also conceptual - for subjects' experiences, Caixa para Guardar o Vazio is, therefore, an architectonic-sculptural document of a free feminine subjectivity, absolutely relevant to a contemporary rethinking of architecture, urban space, sculpture, space and look.
Notas
[1] By "feminist architecture" we will have, throughout the text, connotation of the processes of construction and experience of spaces, and their transforming potentialities, in what are their gender-specific characteristics (going back to the French feminist theorizations of sexual difference).
[2] The striated space would be identified with fabric or basketry — a set of parallel elements, horizontal and vertical, that intersect —, presenting a right and a wrong and tending to become homogeneous. The smooth space, on the other hand, would be characteristic of felt - the anti-fabric -, not implying, as such, crisscrossing, but only fiber interlacing; without right or wrong side, it would be heterogeneous, amorphous.
[3] The classic perspective model was built on a male gaze that has been fixed on women and contaminates them with an otherness that relentlessly relegates them to the condition of Other, as opposed to the same, male – invoking Simone de Beauvoir's paradigmatic lexicon in The Second Sex (Beauvoir, 2009).
[4] It will also be relevant to remember the theorization of the male gaze, developed by Laura Mulvey (Mulvey, 2009).
[5] Remember, by the way, Brunelleschi and the first experiments on perspective, in which the Piazza del Duomo was reflected conditioned by an immobile and unique point of view.
[6] Walter Benjamin looks at architecture as the effective work's consummation of art, because it is based on a tactile appropriation of constructions (BENJAMIN, 2007: 239-240).
[7] A true promenade architecturale would offer a constant change of views, lending itself to the appreciation of a subject in motion, as advocated by Le Corbusier (LE CORBUSIER, 1964: 24).
References
Beauvoir, S. (2009), O Segundo Sexo - Volume I, Lisboa: Quetzal Editores. Benjamin, Walter (2007), Illuminations - Essays and Reflections, Nova Iorque: SchockenBooks.
Bruno, G. (2007), Atlas da Emoção: Jornadas em Arte, Arquitetura e Cinema, Nova York: Verso.
Deleuze, G. e Guattari, F. (2004), Mil Planaltos: Capitalismo e Esquizofrenia 2, Lisbon: AssÃrio e Alvim.
Fausch, D. (1996), "The Knowledge of the Body and the Presence of History": TowardaFeminist Architecture", em Coleman, Debra (ed.), Arquitetura e Feminismo, Nova York: Princeton Architectural Press, 38-59.
Fragateiro, F. (2007), Caixa para Guardar o Vazio, Lisbon: AssÃrio & Alvim. Irigaray, Luce (1985), This Sex Which Is Not One, Nova York: Cornell University Press.
Le Corbusier (1964), Oeuvre Complète, vol. 2, Zurique: Editions Gisberger.
Krauss, Rosalind (1984), "Sculpture in the Expanded Field", em Foster, Hal (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Washington: Bay Press, p. 31-42.
Mulvey, Laura (2007), Visual and Other Pleasures, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Author: Joana Tomé
Profession: Designer and co-founder of the design studio MATH IS GOOD. Ph.D. in Fine Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon
Affiliation: Researcher at the Center of Research and Studies in Fine Arts (CIEBA), Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon