UG8
Souvenirs and Foreign Ghosts Colin Herperger, Thomas Pearce
Year 2 Ella Caldicott, Jun Chan, Krina Christopoulou, Morgan Hamel de Monchenault, James Hepper, Janis Ho, Rory Noble-Turner, Daniel Pope, Ryan Walsh Year 3 James Bradford, Danny Dimbleby, Tae Woo (Freddy) Hong, Charles Redman, Isaac Simpson, Matthew Taylor, Minh Tran The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
Special thanks to our technical tutor Scott Batty and to Soma Sato. Thanks to our critics and speakers Charles Arsène-Henry, Alessandro Ayuso, Amy Begg, William Bondin, Tom Budd, Alastair Browning, Matthew Butcher, Nat Chard, Max Dewdney, Patch DobsonPérez, Gary Edwards, Stephen Gage, Penelope Haralambidou, Niki-Marie Jansson, Carlos Jiménez, Mara Kanthak, Felipe Lanuza Rilling, Ifigeneia Liangi, Anna Liu, Luke Lupton, Johanna Maierski, Shaun Murray, Ian Ng, Davide Sacconi, Peter Scully, Greg Storrar, Tom Svilans, Mohammed Syafiq Jubri, Josh Toh, William Trossell, Athanasios Varnavas, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Boon Yik Chung and Simon Withers Thank you as well to our sponsors: Harlequin Floors, Fernox, & ScanLAB Projects
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Max Ernst paints a garden. When he has finished the picture, he sees that he has forgotten to paint a tree. He immediately has the tree cut down. Jean Baudrillard (1997) Souvenir is a verb. To remember (se souvenir) is to construct, repair, erase, project, extend, consolidate, extract, mystify. Memory is a tool of invention as well as a repository of truth. This year UG8 investigated how memory and mistranslation can play an active role in creative practice. We set out to refashion (the) Souvenir as a complex and subjective material practice of physical and mental construction, oscillating between the stubborn materiality of the physical artefact and an active notion of memory. Preferring the German-English mistranslation “to make a picture” to the more passive English “to take a picture”, we followed Max Ernst into his garden and started to edit reality driven by the shadows, gaps, outcasts, eccentricities, aberrations and off-cuts of memories, hidden between the cracks of consciousness and the seams of London’s urban fabric. Our field trip lead us to Japan, the theatre of conflicting mnemonic practices of ritual remembering and constructive forgetting, where the re-enactment of architectural craftsmanship outlives the western obsession with the so-called 'original' object or building. Our own building projects were then conceived as 'Foreign Ghosts', which enjoyed the opportunity of being foreign within the familiar context of London. Following in the footsteps of architects like Bruno Taut or Frank Lloyd Wright, who architecturally absorbed 'Japan-ness' through the lens of their own ambitions, we devised architectural strategies that deployed our imported memories while leaving space for creative (mis)translation, constructive forgetting, selective amnesia, fabricated origins and the ever-shifting re-inventions of the verb se souvenir. In UG8, we like to make disobedient things and find curiosity within challenging ideas. This is delightfully hard but is nurtured within the studio through creative practice – a focused learning of architectural craft and technique through repeated prediction, attempt, reflection and iteration. This allows for the development of an intuitive ability to become precise in a manner that does not hold responsibility to prove, but more importantly the will to find out. We seek pleasure in the precision of the unresolved.