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Residency
STAGE DIRECTIONS / WAITING ROOM
Architect Joanna Zawieja and artist Andjeas Ejiksson are invited to a residence in the foyer of MDT with their project “Stage Directions / Waiting Room #2”, which is under construction from November 3 to November 28. The structure is to be constructed and demolished within this timeframe in the entrance room. On the afternoon of Nov 23 a topping out event will be arranged.
The architectural process is never neutral. The tool affects what is created. The drawing, the primary tool, plays a double role in architecture: in part it represents the ideal reality, in part it functions as a guide though the process of construction. The drawing depicts the ideal of the completed project through an orthographic description in which architecture is often portrayed as a series of autonomous objects frozen in time. The physical work, the conflicts, the life, and the decay that surround a construction remain invisible in the drawing.
Stage Directions is an architectural tryout. The work takes as its starting point one of the most basic architectural conventions, the orthographic drawing, and explores written instructions as an alternative architectural tool: Can stage directions function as building instructions? Can they convey desires and needs that drawings leave out? Can they encompass the temporality of the site from conception to demolition?
Though a written instruction dictates and establishes conditions, it is also open to unforeseeable situations and solutions. The text allows for what is being experienced, both by the writer and the reader, and is thus both superior and inferior to the context. In writing there is also a temporal aspect that makes process central, that creates a redistribution of auteurship, and a continuous attentiveness to the usage of the building. This is not about idealizing the indeterminable; by exploring the tools, temporality, and possibilities of the architectural process, we wish to focus on architecture as a dynamic process that continues beyond the drawing board and construction of a building.
(Concept: Andjeas Ejiksson and Joanna Zawieja. Construction: Diskursbygg. Supported by: The Royal Institute of Art and Einar Mattsons stiftelse.)