Hélène Frichot: Feminist Design Power Tool

How to make yourself a

Feminist Design Power Tool HÊlène Frichot

How to Make Yourself a

Feminist Design Power Tool HÊlène Frichot

Contents

P.5 Introduction: Taking Instructions

P.29 Step One: Just Do It (Now That You’ve Already Begun)

P.45 Step Two: Compose a List, Make a Manifesto

P.59 Step Three: Construct a Conceptual Persona and an Aesthetic Figure

P.83 Step Four: Chart Your Environment-World

P.109 Step Five: Collectivise a Heteroglossary

P.125 Step Six: Follow the Material!

P.146 A Final Note Bibliography

Introduction: Taking Instructions The greatest potential, and the greatest threat, in writing instructions is that they can be subverted, reinvented, and recuperated for dubious ends. The object of the instructions outlined in what follows is to extend an invitation toward an ‘experimentation in contact with the real’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 2). These instructions are an invitation to simply go ahead and try to see what happens when you make contact with your local environment-world.

The challenge lies in altering prevalent practices that rely on (bad) habits, (mere) opinions, and (prejudiced) clichés. It’s a question of how to circumvent the empty platitudes you use to sooth yourself in the face of radical contingency as you struggle within your local universe of value, especially when it turns out, after all, to be wildly unpredictable. To take a risk, but also to take care.

While the user’s guide is intended to be received as a playful invitation, it is directed toward the serious question of how, as architects or becoming-architects, Fig. 1 (left): Hélène Frichot, Maria Reiche dot-to-dot, 2016.

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and also as artists and designers, you might alter your practices and think and do otherwise amidst your local environment-world. Playing off the idea of a ‘user’s guide’ (which is what instructions are), and extending an invitation to ‘do it yourself’ and mess with the instructions explored here, I will outline a series of steps. This will mean that I will take on a somewhat exaggeratedly pedagogical, although I hope not didactic, approach. There is an inherent and intended dysfunctionality in these instructions as they await further use, because they do nothing by themselves. They do not posit a readymade answer or a solution to a problem that is yet to be named, nor are they a well-planned choreography of the kind formulated in anticipation of a battle.

Ideally, a (concept) tool and its associated instructions emerge directly in contact with a given material field of action, a ‘site’ if you like, which erupts as a matter of concern that brings a number of interested subjects or actors together (Latour, 2005). The instructions I offer below are inspired by a great number of thinkers and practitioners, who admittedly come from a number of fields, not just from within architecture, design or art. If I sign what appears to be my own name to these instructions and tools, it is always in recognition of the great debt that I happily owe to my precursors. I’ll avoid where possible mentioning the big names, which can feel so overwhelming, so large and over-impressive; names, 6

nonetheless, will necessarily appear here and there, as fleeting signatures. In addition, toward the end of each Step in this guide, I draw attention to examples.

Beyond mere illustrations, the use of these examples is motivated by my own proximity with the work that they are the product of. I have learnt a great deal from the projects I present.

Instructions can also be verbally issued, such as between a client and a lawyer, between a patient and a doctor, or between a choreographer and a dancer.

They might also be instructions on how to lead a life, even an ethical life, and how to do this from the midst of your creative practice, a discussion that will be raised in the final chapter, Step 6 of this guide.

It is all very well to offer up imperatives: Be creative! Experiment now! Such calls risk making matters worse, as the very act of creation that the architect, artist, or designer (as ‘creative type’) desires to succeed in is supposed to be a terribly mysterious, alchemical process. Architect-designers, unlike scientists, tend to be deeply suspicious of methods, and once methods become methodologies (as in established ways of doing things) then the architect runs away… fast. Creation is out of step with itself and cannot be second-guessed: it is less methodical, more erratic, taking wild leaps and making improbable connections. This does not, however, mean that instructions cannot be followed in curious ways to procure radical outcomes, or that methods cannot be 7

improvised, or that provisional methodologies cannot be discussed or shared.

You must make your own map of your local environment-world – and better still, do this collectively – thereby making connections that expose you to other worlds and subjectivities in process. The feminist ethos that forms a supportive background here, and which will also loom into view from time to time, aims to unsettle the status quo, to question normative structures, and to disturb unconscious schema – to upset different renditions of what can also be described under the moniker of a hegemonic ‘image of thought’. The image of thought: meaning what it is to get stuck in a rut, to think that, to think of course it’s like that, naturally! So these instructions go about asking how can such dogmatic structures be challenged where they become most oppressive.

An immediate problem arises in that it is often hard to see or recognise when and where you are oppressed. You rely on what you have come to expect as you traverse the familiar landscapes of daily life.

This is what normalisation, what an internalisation of implicit disciplinary regimens, does: it makes everything seem ho-hum. Please carry on as usual.

Everyday life, its habitual modes of practice and associated habitats, come to seem so regular, so acceptable, and oh so predictable. Right up until the point you are stopped dead in your tracks and realise you can proceed no further.

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Regular habits, and how they assume a well-tempered habitat, can be comforting, like a feeling for home where every phenomenological nook and corner is felicitously known. Sometimes, it is exactly this regulated disciplined rhythm of life that arouses the desire to be disruptive, to be radical, that is, to cast out in another direction. To explore other modes of practice is exactly the challenge this instruction guide proposes to extend.

This holds specific relevance for the discipline and practice of architecture, which is at its core a conservative discipline, even while it attempts to make of its works something radical. In architecture, matters become quite paradoxical because architects usually want to make of their practices and forms something exceptional, something adventurously avant-garde, or else something that is simply good enough to make an appearance where it counts (print media, online, Web 2.0, etc.). The ambitions of an avant-garde or rather a neo-avant-garde too quickly empty out, and the best of intentions (of architects) risk turning into dull refrains. The advance party, the architectural vanguard, heads further into exhausted posthuman landscapes in search of illusions. Grasping at a mirage. Battling windmills. Becoming, all the while, more entrenched in old ways. One of those old ways pertains to the exclusion of certain persona, certain kinds of actors, from the ‘theatre’ of architecture. Although you are not supposed to complain, 9

to entertain something of a becoming-the-director of the MIHF. The central task of the MIHF is to maintain sufficient structural support to sustain a suspension of disbelief. This is important, because although this project deploys a ficto-critical methodology, its concerns are serious as they seek to address the contemporary plight of fear, xenophobia and loneliness in what is presumed to be the polite, restrained and well-mannered Nordic city of Stockholm. To address these broad concerns, Olga has had to follow the material of her local environment-world, gleaning observations from a situated knowledge of her context.

She reads the material-semiotics available in the expressions of faces on the street, small newspaper articles, testimonies passed on from mouth to ear, historical documents and narratives. And she enjoys encounters with historical characters to whom she returns something of a novel life.

Olga composes what she calls architectural herstories. These include the eighteenth-century outsider artist Josabeth Sjรถberg and her series of watercolour renditions of the interiors she has rented across the inner city island of Stockholm. As both her parents died young, Josabeth must make do by offering music lessons and tuition to the children of well-to-do families. She lives an itinerant, sometimes lonely existence, but makes friends with Ferdinand, an inventor. One night Ferdinand is met with a violent sexual encounter when a marauding group of drunks 75

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assail him, and as a response he designs a series of gaslight beacons across the Stockholm city skyline. Each marks a place where a special door can be accessed that allows one to ascend toward the beacons and trace a tightrope safe-passage across the Stockholm, clear of the dark city streets.

Then there is Märta Helena, who is well known for her diaries. She lives on the small island of Ärsta Holmer (Stockholm is a geographically peculiar city that is composed as an archipelago). To these figures is added an unnamed elderly woman who has been moved out of her apartment as she is now too old to manage on her own, whose future is uncertain for she has no family, and aged care facilities leave much to be desired. With these characters and others Olga creates so many aesthetic personae who stir the circulation of affects and percepts, and do this by guiding Olga in her design of the MIHF. Josabeth’s skirt is writ large as a curtain that marks off an underground stage where altered subjectivities are performed; Märta’s diaries are the source of information for two reading towers; and Ferdinand’s system of beacons informs the fiery light that projects from the top of the double-glass bell that composes the aboveground folly of the MIHF. The whole must be able to stand on its own for the time being, and this is what the MIHF does; to Fig. 2 (left): Olga Tengvall, Moral Institute of Higher Fiction, 2014.

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achieve this, Olga must care deeply for her undertaking – she must be interested (not disinterested).

Olga stands as what Isabelle Doucet, after Donna Haraway, calls a modest witness (Doucet, 2015: 23; Haraway, 1997). She brings an ethics of care to the situation in which she finds herself. To be a modest witness, Doucet explains, is to exercise a kind of attention which maintains, cares for, and endeavours to repair our world. This means avoiding the temptation of making generalisations, of presuming that your discoveries are fit for all. It also means avoiding claims of exclusive authority, and instead extending an invitation of sorts to others from the midst of your community of practice. And so the conceptual persona and the aesthetic figure both speak to a reader or a listener who is yet to lend an ear, and who might be positively transformed in the encounter, inspired to experiment with their own creative and critical endeavours. As Haraway writes, ‘A figure collects up the people; a figure embodies shared meanings in stories that inhabit their audiences’ (1997: 23), and a modest witness of some sort tends to be involved.

I want to introduce one final modest and determined witness, who performs both as a conceptual persona and as an aesthetic figure. She is the curious character of the German mathematician and archaeologist Maria Reiche, a geometer of sorts whose life’s task was to trace landscape figures onto large sheets of paper. She has appeared prom78

inently on the web-banner of the 15th Architecture Biennale in Venice (2016), a significant locale where architectural culture is circulated. Curiously, she is quite often overlooked, and many have not even caught her name, but the curator, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, has made quite a big deal out of her, transforming her into an aesthetic figure who can affectively enunciate his concerns for a socially driven sustainable architecture. The aesthetic figure that Aravena appropriates has been taken from an essay by Bruce Chatwin, who encounters Reiche in Peru wandering around the vast desert landscape that is called the Pampa de Ingenio (Chatwin, 1989).

She had been occupying this landscape for some forty years, since 1932, when Chatwin met her in the nineteen-seventies. The image used by Aravena for the Biennale banner depicts Reiche as a distinctly female figure perched upon an aluminium ladder, skirt billowing outwards, gazing over the dry empty landscape of the Pampa. Only the landscape is not empty at all. It is traced over with ancient lines, over 2000 years old, demarcating fantastic patterns and shapes: geometric forms begging decryption, and a bestiary of animals, including a guano bird, a spider monkey, a dog and a humming bird (Chatwin, 1989: 89). Maria Reiche had taken it upon herself to measure and trace these ancient Nazca lines in order to determine whether their arrangement was coordinated with the movement of the planet, the 79

cyclical passing of the seasons, the winter and summer solstices. Chatwin explains that she could add up ‘strings of decimals’ in her head, and when these got too large, she would make a note of them in the folds of her skirt (94).

On her aluminium ladder, which she carries around the desert landscape with her, Maria Reiche becomes technologically augmented. She achieves just the right distance above the ground, while remaining materially attached to it. Both embedded in the landscape at the same time as able to achieve just the slightest of technological advantages she manages to secure an advantageous point of view.

From this technologically augmented, embodied position she is able to perform what can be called ‘immanent critique’. While she becomes an aesthetic figure when cut out by Aravena and placed on banners and book covers, she also maintains the role of a conceptual persona who forces us to think. Aravena draws several interesting lessons from her work, but the problem that persists is that, despite the best of his intentions, Maria is rendered strangely mute. She even risks becoming petrified much like that statuesque female figure standing with arms raised defensively in the reflection pool of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. In such instances, it is sometimes necessary to wrest aesthetic figures out of the contexts in which they risk becoming imprisoned, and to revive the concepts 80

of conceptual personae so that their messages can produce other associations.

A modest witness can only become a conceptual persona once they have signed their name (provisionally) to a concept-tool that they have deployed successfully in a problematic field from the midst of their encounters in an environment-world. Along the way, from time to time, a conceptual persona might just succeed in producing an aesthetic figure that stirs up affects and percepts. Between concepts that arouse thinkables, and affects and percepts that stimulate sensations, an environment-world might just be witnessed in a different way – in a way that makes a positive difference, if all goes well. What, then, are the means by which an environment-world can be mapped? How do you answer the question: Where are you right now?

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Step Four: Chart Your Environment-World

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here have been some who have wanted to proclaim that ‘environment’ and ‘world’ are both exhausted terms that artificially stabilise otherwise wildly fluctuating milieux (Morton, 2016), to claim that these are both terms that are caught up in assumptions about human exceptionalism. Yet surely when worked together ‘world’ and ‘environment’ can be resituated and revived? Played out on a new stage? As Stengers argues, to dramatize a concept is to forge a connection to it, to think with it (Stengers, 2014: 195). The world is a big and all-engulfing concept, but once localised it can take on a different value, it can loom closer and support a sense of orientation, a critical reorientation, even, amidst our practices. Again, it would appear to be a question of location: Where are you right now?

There is nothing more distracting and misleading than those images of the earth rendered as though it were a blue marble, photographed, improbably, from out there, not quite outer space, but certainly in orbit.

Fascinating in its affective pull, this is an image that many thinkers and critics, from Jane Rendell (2010) to Peter Sloterdijk (2009; 2014) to Bettina Schwalm (2014), have returned to since the crew on the Apollo 17 captured it on the 7th of December, 1972. Sloterdijk suggests that this point of view procures another Copernican revolution in terms of our outlook, writing that ‘Ever since the early sixties an inverted astronomy has thus come into being, looking down from space 85

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THE PRACTICE OF THEORY AND THE THEORY OF PRACTICE The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic information is available on the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de How to Make Yourself a Feminist Design Power Tool Hélène Frichot © Copyright 2016 by Author and Spurbuchverlag ISBN: 978-3-88778-498-0 Publication © by Spurbuchverlag 1. print run 2016 Am Eichenhügel 4, 96148 Baunach, Germany All rights reserved.

No part of the work must in any mode (print, photocopy, microfilm, CD or any other process) be reproduced nor – by application of electronic systems – processed, manifolded nor broadcast without approval of the copyright holder.

AADR – Art Architecture Design Research publishes research with an emphasis on the relationship between critical theory and creative practice.

AADR Curatorial Editor: Prof Dr Rochus Urban Hinkel, Stockholm Production: pth-mediaberatung GmbH, Würzburg Graphic Design: Moa Sundkvist, Stockholm

Set amidst the experimental ecology of practices that supports feminist thinking and doing in architecture, this small book outlines an instruction guide that presents six provocative steps toward the invention of productive concept-tools. It invites readers to explore creative and messy methodologies that combine an aesthetics with a practical ethics. Frichot encourages us to think and do architecture in ways that challenge a dogmatic status quo that celebrates major figures, while overlooking the care and labour of minor figures and practices.

Hélène Frichot (PhD) is Associate Professor and Docent in Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm; she is the director of Critical Studies in Architecture. Frichot co-curated the Architecture+ Philosophy public lecture series in Melbourne, Australia (2005–2014) and is co-convener of numerous conferences on alternative practices, feminism, theory and criticality in architecture.

www.aadr.info www.spurbuch.de