Phantom Writing

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59490/footprint.18.1.6947

Abstract

In this visual essay I present a body of artistic work done within informal urban and suburban heritage sites in Kyoto. Through the media of text, photography, film and site-specific painting, my works from the cycle Spirit Grounds engage with these sites involving material physical aspects as well as beliefs, fictions, and more-than-human beings. Building upon this, I propose ‘phantom writing’ or ‘phantasmography’ as a situated, multidisciplinary and multisensory approach aimed at understanding and designing contemporary places, landscapes and environments, acknowledging and mediating the agency of diverse phantoms and phantasms.

Author Biography

Michael Hirschbichler, Delft University of Technology

Michael Hirschbichler works across the disciplines of art, architecture and anthropology. He is the director of Atelier Hirschbichler and a researcher at TU Delft. His work focuses on spatial constructions in the Anthropocene, with a particular emphasis on the interrelationship between their material and immaterial aspects (narratives, memories, ideologies, beliefs), between facts and cultural fictions. Hirschbichler studied at ETH Zurich and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and completed his doctoral dissertation on ‘Mythical Constructions’ at Berlin University of the Arts. He was a lecturer at ETH Zurich, visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and director of the architecture programme at the Papua New Guinea University of Technology. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize by the German Academy Villa Massimo.

References

Bubandt, Nils. ‘Anthropocene Uncanny: Nonsecular Approaches to Environmental Change.’ In A Non-secular Anthropocene: Spirits, Specters and Other Nonhumans in a Time of Environmental Change, edited by Nils Bubandt, 42-53. Aarhus: AURA Working Papers Vol. 3, 2018.

Desjarlais, Robert. ‘Phantasmography.’ American Anthropologist 118, no. 2 (June 2016): 400-407.

Hirschbichler, Michael. Geistergrund / Spirit Grounds / 霊地 . Vienna: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2021.

Hirschbichler, Michael. ‘Phantasmography. Spaces of Extraction.’ IKA Pre¬view Sum¬mer 2021 (2021): 10-11.

Hirschbichler, Michael. ‘Phantasmography II. Spaces of Accumulation.’ IKA Pre¬view Winter 2021 (2021): 10-11.

Hirschbichler, Michael. ‘Phantasmography.’ IKA Review Summer 2021 (2022): 2-3.

Hirschbichler, Michael. ‘Phantasmography.’ IKA Review Winter 2021 (2022): 2.

Tsing, Anna, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, and Heather Anne Swanson. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

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Published

2024-09-30

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 1 (2024): Issue # 34 | Narrating Shared Futures

Section

Visual Essay

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Michael Hirschbichler

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