The Smooth and the Striated

The Pit of Babel: A Speculative Archive program contained work concerned with issues of history, memory and space.  Sobhi al-Zobaidi, a Palestinian filmmaker currently conducting doctoral research at Simon Fraser University, was in attendance and had two short works included in the program: red green black and white Indians (2008) and About the Sea (2007). After the screening he spoke about his work, prompting dialogue about the identification felt between the First Nations and Palestinian peoples, and the connection between the geography of a people and their history. This concern for how the land or space a group occupies was explored elsewhere in the program by way of architecture. Oliver Husain’s Squiggle was the narration of a man recalling his youth in India studying Fine Arts, accompanied by a video of Indian men and woman building with mud and brick. Disillusioned with the “self indulgence” of a career in art, the narrator turns to learning a more socially relevant discipline: a traditional Indian architectural technique called mud architecture. Mud architecture uses a resource that is in abundance, can be reused, lasts longer than modern materials, and connects the people in an Indian community to skills practiced by their ancestors. The space Husain’s concerned with is smaller than al-Zobaidi’s, but has a very similar resonance. 

I feel compelled to note that the relevance of architecture to a community is touched on also by one of the installation pieces this year at Signal + Noise. I had the pleasure of interviewing Courtney Hunt and Alex Witko of Organelle Design about their practice. The Vancouver company uses off the shelf, found and discarded materials to create spaces and objects that reconstitute waste as resource.  More on that to come!

credit: Sarah Young

Oliver Husain, Squiggle