It Had Something to do With the Telling of Time
April 2015
I am no longer sitting in the living room. I am in a place I have been, but never tread.
Under covers, between pages, within letters and punctuations marks you find spaces lingering between fiction and reality. The following excerpt, Act 2 ‘The Museum/The Contemplator’,is part of a screenplay in seven acts, that is based on extracting concepts of space found in fictional writing.
The screenplay is part of a book called ‘It Had Something to do With the Telling of Time’that I wrote as a part of my graduation work at the Studio for Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Instituut. Within this project I made a selection of seven novels that each represent a concept of space. Among the novels I have used in the screenplay are well-known works of literature such as Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Franz Kafka's’ The Trial and The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne.
The spatial qualities of each passage have been made accessible through a conversation between the protagonist or the narrator of the novel and myself, as the fictional space. Alice becomes ‘The Explorer’ encountering the fictional space of ‘The Portal’, the protagonist in ‘The Trial’ is met through the narrator in the capacity of ‘The Lost’ within the fictional space of ‘The Maze’, and the narrator in ‘The Mysterious Island’ becomes ‘The Observer’ encountering the fictional space of ‘The Cave’. Through these passages I have given each space a voice, allowing them to tell you their own story, what they stand for and what they can be seen in relation to. Such as different aspects of space, experience, memories or tactility, like the cave identifying as being the childhood hiding place under the dining room table, or how the cave can be seen in relation to architectural structures, such as when it is being told that it resembles byzantine and gothic architecture. As a collective they convey a story of spaces in time.
My aim within the screenplay has not been to reach certain conclusions, but to open up, inspire and to try to push boundaries by suggesting how real space can be explored and altered through the use of fiction. For me it is an on going research in expanding my approach towards the act of making, investigating how tools and techniques found in fiction can be explored as a possible methodology for an architectural practice. To turn a table, you first have to know what a table is.
The project has been awarded funding from the Stimuleringsfonds and it is expected to be published and launched in October 2015 together with Onomatopee in Eindhoven. Graphic design by Amsterdam based designer Sven van Asten.
Annee Grøtte Viken, 2014
Annee Grøtte Viken
