Lucas Kalmus
LOCITECTURE: PLACE-WEAVING
Locus (genitiv Loci): place, spot, territory, neighborhood, position // Tecture (from tekhne) from PIE root *teks - : to plait, also: to weave
Facing the separation of space production and knowledge production the proposal aims at relating both. The Artistic PhD project Locitecture aims to interweave scientific data with derived knowledge from historical analyses and transdisciplinary research into artistic practice on architectural territories.
One of the objectives is to develop an idea of Landscape as an impermanent composition of emerging temporalities, spaces and conscious interpretations. While cyclical, not necessarily synchronized with a human life span.
A Locitecture in its morphology and composition could be clear and simple or abstract and concerted. A shack, float, boat, pavilion, house, cave or hall. In each constructed scale it relies on collective labor and collaborative utilization. Legitimate agents considered in collaboration of any realization may include human makers and planners as well as the soil, a rock, a river or a tree as they might be represented by a local board of representatives. Moreover, a collaborator is considered each agent that utilizes or influences the structure. Think of an owl, a ladybug or the east wind. The logic of place weaving is rooted in dialog between matters. As a local project its temporal occurrence avows to the permeability of place.
The drained agricultural plains and former peatland cluster surrounding the city of Bremen lends itself as a case study for this research as my personal upbringing happened here.
Wetland canalization and colonization has been widely operative over the last centuries. As a means to “sanitized modernity” it was practiced in the west and exported into colonial projects. The radical transformation of territories incorporated undifferentiated conversions of diverse ecosystems into homogenous planes for agriculture or settlement as a means to become used as unpaid utility, and modernized eventually.
To reencounter abandoned knowledge and traumatic histories of intensified extraction in a playful way, rhizomatic mapping techniques seek to recontextualize lost material occurrences or almost forgotten techniques into flows of the present. This may include refined or raw materials, labor skills or spatial conditions such as streaming humidity, directed sunlight, channeled wind. Through artistic expressions in various media and spatial interventions, reimagined narratives can be utilized to open new vaults of imaginaries.
Image credit: Lucas Kalmus
