Project of my ‘self’ is a tumblr curated by Golnar Abbasi which contains the elements of the author’s postgraduate thesis project at The Berlage Center (2013-2014). Text and images are associated to conduct an investigation of the author’s own domain of subjectivity, illustrating day-by-day spaces and activities. The description of common interior spaces, from the personal room to the classroom, explores the notion of intimacy in its contemporary overlapping with the working sphere.
In some parts, the project reminds an artistic investigation with self-inflicted rules in the line of Bruce Nauman’s instructions and performance pieces, e.g.: “Working in a square defined on the ground, for a few hours. (my bedroom)” appears as an updated version of “Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square”
On another level, the research echoes the voluntary exhibition of private spaces in the obsessive photographic description of the rooms Greek architect and writer Aristide Antonas has slept in (“Self definition from one’s own traces“).
Project of my ‘self’ reveals an interesting detournement of the micro-curating platform of “Tumblr” turned into a tool to support a coherent project. As described in the author’s words:
The project investigates everyday life following Foucauldian discourse of biopolitics. With politicization of everyday life, when life itself has become an object of governance, the project investigates the blurring separation of life and work. As “life” is the emblem of living conditions, the practice of living is one of the paradigmatic means for a (critical) project. So the practice of living of the author here becomes the means of praxis. Repetition and temporalization of everyday acts and decisions of living (ethics), becomes a critical means to explore an architectural project despite the given frames of architectural practices.The projects aims to reissue notions of project, praxis, mediality of technique, and autonomy in today’s practice of architecture through exploring practices of the self.
Images © Golnar Abbasi
Via: projectofmyself.tumblr.com
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