Dining with interdepenedency : a new dining scenario
(2025)
author(s): Ariana Amir Hosseini
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
MA Interior Architecture (INSIDE)
Ariana Amir Hosseini's graduation project questions the normatisation of the artificial environment dictated by the Vitruvian anthropometric scale alone, introduced by early modernist architecture manuals such as the "neufert - architect's data" (1939). This, in her view, is limited to promoting the efficiency of everyday activities while neglecting many other values that architecture and design can offer such as the connection between people.
By focusing on the ritual of food, Ariana disrupts such everyday and important actions as, preparing food, cooking it and eating it, by proposing surreal spaces and objects that encourage connections between people based on a normatisation of interdependent actions.
Little Do They Know
(2022)
author(s): Olivia Rowland
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition functions as both a visual and poetic essay, and a manifesto for my methodology of ‘line’. My definition of ‘line’, defined here as:
‘The gestural and abstracting tandem force of drawing-and-writing as a narrative means to express selfhood.’
The exposition posits the methodology of ‘line’ as one alternate artistic means to artistically communicate feminine selfhood. The methodology of line works to resist the internalised assignment of feminine voice to a corporeal body.
Instead, ‘line’ communicates selfhood through poetic means and a sense of fragmented corporeality. Visually, the stark and abstracting nature of the drawn line, and the allegorical, metaphorical nature of writing present an abstracted self that playfully evades full understanding.
The titling phrase ‘Little Do They Know’ intones a kind of secret power on behalf of the speaker, and the presence of secret and intricate worlds to which the gaze of the spectator has limited access. It is on this premise which the exposition operates, articulating the presence (in all its anxiety, instability, rage, joy and frustration) of a playful and evasive selfhood that reclaims agency from the spectator’s gaze.
