In this task, I have mapped trajectories of eight people and things in Vardø. It is an attempt to map and imagine the complexity of what is going in a place. Mapping everyday situations, such as walking to school or grocery shopping at Ica. How much time is being spent in everyday situations. The mapping takes place over 24 hours, a film roll for each trajectory, together with a tracking, drawn over an actual map of Vardø. A slice in time, a story with neither beginning or end.
These trajectories are only fiction. Though all places they visited in Vardø are real places. I have tried to put together stories of people that have a certain degree of reality in them. But it is also an exercise in trying to understand what is going on in a place, and to picture the life of the people living there and how they spend their time. It also made me aware of how many different ways it is possible to tell a story, as it was up to me, to decide the photos of the filmrolls. Made me aware that the story of a day in life could be told in so many different ways. This puts into question, how we map as architects, because, there is not one way of understanding a place. There are as many ways as there are people.
Even though this is fiction, there is information that can be read out of this diagram, that is relevant. It has to do with movement inbetween places. The building up of a place like Vardø, how people move frequently in the town centre, and seldom on the edges of the island, where there are no roads. What the diagram also makes us aware of, is there is no differantiation in moving in the landscape, at sea, or in the town. What happens to movement when it is no longer bound to a place.
These last three slides question the way a story is being told. And how much information, and interconnections are there to be mapped into each moment of a life. Endlessly. There are multiple ways of telling the same story, and there are threads/points/connections that can be tied up to every situation, moment, photo. There is not one way to tell a story, facing this amount of information, of what is going on at a place, realizing the complexity of place/space/time. And how everything is interconnected.
2 comments:
In the discussion that was brought up in the mid-term review, my mapping of Vardø, and it not being based on facts, was questioned. My impression was, that many agreed it was not a ‘relevant’ mapping, or a basis for further work, since what I had mapped had never taken place.
I think this brings up a relevant discussion, though it was not discussed during the mid-term. Namely, the one regarding/about how we map as architects. It may seem that architects have ‘norms’ of what are considered legitimate/acceptable ways of mapping. These norms are not clearly defined. Is it just something we know? When Peter Zumthor draws a sketch on a napkin, is it legitimate, as a process/mapping/understanding of place/space. More so, than if I had done the same? Has it something to do with the person that does the mapping then?
Or Italo Calvinos many versions of the same city in ‘Invisible cities’, though all of them are highly subjective, it is not questioned if his work is relevant. Isn’t this also a mapping method, that shows us series of ways of understanding the exact same place. Which proves a point; there is not one correct way of understanding place/space.
I am not sure if the interesting part of this discussion is whether a mapping reflects factual reality or not. I think what is relevant is how we use mappings to understand place/space. To me, the mapping was a tool to understand the complexity of what is going on in Vardø. Mappings are often reduced to what is visible in a place, or what we saw when we were there. Mapping can also be an exercise in understanding what is not visible. An exercise for your imagination. Architecture is not a science, and investigations and mappings are so often subjective understandings of a place. The way we are taught to work with place/space through DAV at BAS, using methods such as performance, drawing, or art methods as tools for understanding space, further emphasise this point. Sometimes building up a whole project around a 1:1 sketch as an understanding of a site. Is it problematic if the mapping reduces or simplifies a place? To not find anything beyond what you thought you would find there, or what you saw. Not daring to imagine that there exists layers complementing the visible. To map is also daring to imagine a complexity, and daring to understand a place in a different way than you thought you would
Our mapping is relevant because it challenges the seemingly truth; it is investigative and experimental, and based on deep knowledge – and it is subjective because the perception and understanding of the world goes through the individual experience… I remind on the words from Deleuze and Guattari describing what a map is: Make a map, not a tracing. (…) What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconcious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is in it self a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. (…) The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged “competence”.
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