Fluid Architectures: Poetics of the Self

Identity is fluid, everchanging, like desert winds and global tides, as personal and cultural facets shift, intermingle, perpetually Self-reconstructing experientially, over time and place.  Where do the poetics of the Self reside, sheltered in ways of being that house us?  

New performative site-specific installations by Lihong Bai, Lujane Pagganwala and Vincenzo Muratore confer this query, in subtly participatory phenomenological spaces, across three galleries.

In Outsider, Lihong Bai's Installation performance and performance films enact transmigratory journeys, through inner Mongolia’s Kubuqi Desert, China and London. Her journey echoes the cyclical migratory travel and human sheep kinship of her shepherding childhood homeland. Rather than a utopian return, home becomes precariously unattainable, a Faucauldian heterotopia, displaced through accelerated urban-rural change and global travels.  Like the goat, she no longer belongs to the grasslands. She has not been totally transformed by migrating to new environments, in a diasporic betwixt and between state, of comingling identities. 

This filmic narrative and performances are juxtaposed with the materiality of two sculptures. In the intermedia sculpture of painting and film, the enclosing cage-like metal structure signifies societal structures’ pressures on identity. Hay, stacked on a metal table, for food preparation, speaks to transience, a temporary home.  It harkens to the bodily senses of smell, taste, and touch, engaging visitors’ sensorium and haptic visual memory, tethering them to a physical bodily reality, communally shared.

As a performance artist, Bai queries what happens inside and outside the body's spaces, particularly when humans and goats or sheep encounter different social-political cultural spatial contexts. Contemporary urban ways of being are placed alongside ancestral Mongolian sheep herding kinship, rituals and spirituality. Analogies unfold. Bai's performances enact and embody, figuratively and metaphorically, ways of being and Self’s tenuous rediscovery and malleable reconstruction, over time and place. The whole space becomes a performative scenography, speaking to transience and disoriented discomfort of transitioning culturally. Endurance and physical precarity figure into Bai’s performance

Lujane Pagganwala’s The Pagemaster’s Ballad, 2026, is a new intermedia, site-specific installation that disperses transience into a playful sensorial space - sound, smell, touch, taste and sight - where children’s tents hover, hung from the ceiling, punctuated by poetic texts, on the floor. Pagganwala atmospherically reenvisions Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, through a global lens. She enlivens ‘flash spaces,’ spaces that haunt, unleashing buried associations, experiential slippages and memories. Playing with scale and architectural structures, the child-sized tents mimic the gallery’s expansive pitched glass ceiling, to become a dialogue on how we allocate household or gallery activities, as well as, how our bodies inhabit ways of being, within space.  

In temporal-spatial passage, visitors tip-toe to peek into tents and bend to peer at fragile texts, on Isomalt (sugar) sheets, floor-lined in rows. Transience fills the space. Semi-transparent tablets cumulatively form a confabulatory narrative, partially of the visitor’s own devising, conjuring remnants of places seen or dreamed – mind spaces, sensory ‘flash space,’ palimpsests. ‘Spaces await discovery, as do identities, in relation to their contexts,’ (Pagganwala).

Vincenzo Muratore's White Womb series' innovatively paper-thin marble fragments form one room diorama sculptures. When struck with light, they illuminate to reveal, yet partially conceal, cyanotype texts and images.  The White Womb sculptures embody Jungian psychological spaces, self-reflective spaces, cited by Bachelard; wherein, a Western house's stories/floors are analogous to the psyche's strata.  The cyanotype texts and images become visible through the crevices between the tethered fragment walls and small windows. Thus, visitors become captivated in search and discovery - their own discovery, in communion with the artist's poetic self-discovery.  Where is the Self, collective unconscious or soul housed, sheltered within us?

In the White Womb Series, Muratore appropriates marble fragments, to allude to memory and repurposing, not only ecologically, but also perceptually and psychologically. This analogy signifies the reconstructing of the Self, amidst remembered lived experiences, such as trauma. Consequently, the marble walls are precariously tethered, with string or wire, as though awaiting potential reconfiguration.

Muratore explores marble’s, properties and potential, as a versatile contemporary medium, not only experimenting with cyanotype printing, but also etching and digital sculptural techniques.  Markings make the process evident, alluding to the process of Self-discovery or past traces and scars. Thus, spatial qualities within and outside his sculptures have symbolic significance, resonating psychological queries and analogies. In addition, sculptural space acts like a stage for the figurative, wherein sculptural performers suggest a theatrical narrative, in an elusive scenography, flickering in the light, in which visitors play a part, through activated imaginative and physcial engagement.

Fluid Architectures – Poetics of the Self explores the aesthetic nature of curatorial spaces nature, not only as a collaborative conceptual spatial creation of artist and curator, but also as a conveyance of artistic philosophical and psychological propositions, related to space, the phenomenological and the Self. How do multiple installations flow together into a complementary interactive dialogue in one exhibition space? In addition, where do visitors reside, housed within the curatorial space’s resultant ways of being and spatial temporal affect? We hope that visitors experience the artworks’ evocations and propositions, in a passage that evokes the Poetics of the Self, in shifting thematic variations.

References:

Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places. Forward, John R. Stilgore. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Foucault, M. Aesthetics: Essential Works 1954-84. “Different Spaces: A swimmer between two words”. Ed. J. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 2000, 171-85.

Ann Yeoman and Kevin Lu. C. G. Jung’s Collected Works: the basics. Oxin: Routledge, 2024.

 BEVERLEY HARRISON, 

CURATOR & FOUNDER OF FASCICLE CONTEMPORARY