from foaming exercises to scenarios of co-existencies – anticipating emancipatory practices of space
(2020)
author(s): Maiju Loukola
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The structure and dynamics of worldly spaces are neighbourhoodly. In them, different kinds of life forms are connected, in a sharing relation, whether they like it or not. The other facet of the same coin is co-isolation and a state of shared closure. Any position from loving and intimate to aggressive or forced, from solidarity to imprisonment, is detached to and depicted through spatial relations. Infected by the “interpretation of foams” in the final volume of Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy, I chose to take foam architecture onto a surgical table and take a closer look at its spatial, material, metaphorical and conceptual implications. I became driven in making inquieries on co-joined spatiality characterized by the “ontological nervousness of the co-existent, the other, the outer”.[1]
The Foaming Exercises installation was part of one of the research cells of the Research Pavilion #3 and became the first part of an (ongoing) examination of spatial co-existencies. Since then, the study has evolved into an ongoing further study on co-joined spatialities in relation to the emancipatory potential of spatial practices in urban context.
foaming exercises installation – scenarios of polyspatial co-existencies
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): maiju loukola
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
FOAMING EXERCISES INSTALLATION is the first part of a larger examination of spatial co-existencies. The installation took place in the Research Pavilion (RP#3) during May–August 2019. It staged a material and discursive space in which foam was given a leading role as a material substance, a spatial structure and a metaphorical sphere for contemplative exploration.
The “foam-ing exercises” organised in the pavilion included sessions of reading out loud chapters of related texts, with audience invited to gather around a round table on which a large foam-aquarium provided a contemplative scene for thinking through the materiality of co-joined plural spaces, and the conceptual, concrete, and imaginary scenarios effected by this setting of co-joined existencies.
Inspired by philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s spatial trilogy Spheres (Volume I: Bubbles, Volume II: Globes, and especially the Volume III: Foams – Plural Spherology), the bubbly installation came to set a starting point for a larger body of research, which aims at enlarging and concretizing the understanding of the role of spatial practices in relation to their emancipatory potential.
FOAMING EXERCISES INSTALLATION is part of one of the RP#3 research cells, AIRA Artistic Intelligence Research Alternator. AIRA explores means of thematising through artistic and discursive processes that produce new narratives, images and constellations.
AIRA deals with suspension of belief in the interplay of concepts, spaces, things and ideas that can be either/both gravitational and tangible (physical, concrete) or floating and ethereal (clouds, spheres). So it is a starting point of a process where things and entities may have a real place, and may as well have no real place. AIRA investigates something that we call New Fiction.
The foam-ing process (foam as a noun + as verb: foam-ing) focuses at its first phase (in RP#3) to foam’s anatomy by way of launching a series of micro-scale (analogical and digital) explorations of foamy existencies, and starting an archive of small scale samples, taking notes of reflections of the four discursive foaming sessions organised in the pavilion context, and documentation of these processes.