What If Nobody's Home?

Tag: Architecture

  • ‘The Holy Mountain’

    ‘The Holy Mountain’

    Can a film be composed of aphorisms? Very memorable, sexy images which offer a distinction, a definition. If anything, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, in an ironic way, talks to an idea of subjectivity, having purchase on the contemporary world of Instagram, social media, and perhaps even A.I. I watched it recently amongst friends, and we attempted to discuss it after, first thoughts mumbled, whilst the film was replaced on the projector screen with an A.I. generated loop of a cosy Halloween Street. One person shared that its imagery had inspired album and concert tours of Kanye and Lady Gaga.

    I sensed some discontent with what I had seen. At times I did find it very affecting, the detourment – to use Situationist language – of taking existing culture and twisting it: especially in the scene where The Thief climbs the Torres de Satélite, a group of sculptures in the suburbs of Mexico City, translated into a homage to his mentor Buñuel’s Simon in the Desert, making strange the city which has been flattened by capital. A field of red upon which he climbs.

    When I researched Jodorowsky, seeing his connections to Surrealism, to Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty, I started to frame the language of the film in a sort of Hegelian or quasi-Hegelian way, such that everything is always a reflection of itself, back to itself or itself in itself. I started to think of Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, where he frames the master slave dialectic as a relationship where both sides are dependent upon each other for their status. The master is only the master because the slave recognises them as the master. And the slave is more free than the master because the master is more dependent on the slave for his status, and his kind of subjectivity, than the slave.

    Jodorowsky, styling himself as the Alchemist, guides us to the Holy Mountain to meet the Masters, collecting along the way a series of endless paradoxes in which everything is always reflecting everything back to itself, for itself and its own ends – I did nod off slightly in this section…

    Art exploring how we might think, experience and talk about freedom is vital. And what I took from the film is a very Situationist kind of questioning of what stops us from being free? What are the constraints that hinder our flourishing? How to live a life as directly as possible, free from the constraints into which we are cultured? Talking from my own field, at least in the UK, the Secured by Design initiative, where public space is made hostile through the removal of benches, shrubbery and active transport infrastructure in the effort to ‘design out crime’, creates unnatural rhythms in how people use, move through, and think about the public realm. This body politic conception of design by the Police, treating ‘places to gather’, cribbing from Phineas Harper’s reporting on this, as points of infection, a pathologisation of crime, slips into landscape in the form of anti-skate fins, uncomfortable benches and other elements of hostile architecture. A structuring of movement in urban areas around work or consumption, two main functions of capital.

    The film, in its detourment of the everyday – also filmed without permission, like Situationist practices of walking the city – visually contests who could own or who could structure that conception of the city, of freedom, by making it strange. This concern of how power relationships get institutionalised in the city, in culture and its iconography, is similar to historical materialist perspectives which I’ve encountered around the Reproduction of Space. The Holy Mountain, sitting within Avant-Garde attempts to revitalise the everyday, has this evocative and exciting idea, trying to open up possibilities from the routinised experience of post-industrial society.

    Yet one word that struck me, as we were discussing the film, was nihilism; that the spectacle of the film reveals itself to be a visible negation of life, a negation that has taken on a visible form. Without discussing the ending, I found that the entire language and structure of the film created an expectation which is itself a function of capitalist ideology. The film is meta, so what?

    Here I feel like I’m going to be cast out, like other questioners of surrealist and situationist doctrine before me, no longer allowed to be part of film club because I’ve disagreed with Jodorowsky and the film bros love of him. And perhaps I’m being too harsh, unsympathetic to the anger at the co-option and depoliticisation of surrealism; part of the Cold War institutionalisation of Modernism, shaped by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After all, in Buñuel’s film, the Devil takes Simon from his pillar near Aleppo in the 5th century to a New York jazz club in the 20th.

    We live at a different time of screen media and photography than when the film was made. Distribution, whilst still cosying up to corporate and state institutions, on apps like Instagram, produce an aesthetic experience of the world; you too could don white robes and a white hat, and sit between two goats. You too, have the ability to create and share media easily and quickly, banishing the postwar passive spectatorship of the world and even their own lives. The Holy Mountain is responding to a feeling of alienation, surreally attempting to address feeling kind of separated from everyone else, and separated from yourself, and your own activity; an impossibility of living a sort of authentic experience. A media environment in which one was bombarded by images which you couldn’t touch, couldn’t control, couldn’t do anything about. Yet what does it mean to post myself in a white hat? Am I adding to a collective social process of making stuff together? Am I the author of the world I inhabit?

    Like the curated clacking of the keys on my laptop, I’m falling into cliche. Would the first screening of the film in the 1970s be more authentic than my watching experience with the film club, A.I. background and white hat shared to insta? In a moment where accelerationist aesthetics tend to dominate, this line of argument extols that to get out of the spectacle we should not retreat back to nature, but to push through the spectacle basis, to use the spectacle against itself. Again, the nihilism, where there’s no point in struggling to maintain authenticity. Like The Holy Mountain, I have already been recuperated by the spectacle.

  • ‘The River’

    ‘The River’

    Al considers two different imaginaries, Ganga and the Ganges, with Jean Renoir’s 1951 drama.

    Perhaps, as Jay-Ger acknowledges, my retraining in landscape architecture has effected a change in how I spatially experience the world. Earlier this year, I participated in a somatic workshop, drawing out my site. We started by taking a line for a walk, keeping pencil in contact with paper whilst walking around the sculpture court in Edinburgh College of Art. Asked to sketch what was significant, a translation of how we perceived our projects with our movement across the court, I found myself recouping the flows of water into lines, which turned into streams, and eventually fed into the burn which coursed through my site.

    We were asked to title each other’s drawings, and my friend, on seeing what I had produced, noted how it looked like a tree, or perhaps its roots. She called it ‘Arbour’, perhaps trying to spatially articulate the lines as a framework, creating a space within them to stage my intervention.

    I was thinking of this when I recently watched Jean Renoir’s The River, based on the novel by Rumer Godden. It starts with someone making a drawing on silt, one that we see later in the film celebrating Holi, the Indian spring festival of colour. The credits follow, also written in rice paste, perhaps framing the river and its annual deposit of material during the monsoon as the surface upon which the film is created. We are then introduced to the Ganges river, its expanse, with the life and commerce which it supports. This is contrasted with the house and family of an upper-middle class English family, whose patriarch runs a jute mill, in British India.

    Visually, a game is played with the presence and absence of the horizon in the film. The childhood of the protagonist, Harriet, and her siblings are framed by the wall-tops of their garden, enclosing a luscious space so bubbling with fun that they chase away the cares of all who come. A line is drawn, a design act creating a barrier between the garden and the outside world with its horizon. Childhood and its innocence contained within its boundaries. Similarly, we draw a river with a line on both sides, a cartographic separation of land from water. This is the European imagination, delineating and surveying. A line is drawn because you want to hold it, channel it, control it.

    It is this absurd act of existential geomorphology, given the richness of the soil where wetness extends across the catchment, that reminded me of my drawing during the workshop. If you look at a line as a contained thing, it leads to the question of what is normal and what is abnormal. The line acts as a control system, so when you take a starting point what flows is ultimately not a river, not the water, what flows is the line that contains the water, designing a channel. A drawing then is not entirely true. By following the topography, I created a whole reality through the drawn lines, indicating land from water. Through the imaginative act of mapping, of articulating line and surface, I was constructing the water bodies that crossed my site on the basis of a design act that has rarely worked.

    Jean Renoir’s The River uses this colonised conception of the river as a metaphor, and whilst the river doesn’t flood there still is rupture: in the bodily integrity of visiting Captain John; of Harriet’s younger brother Bogey’s obsession with cobras; and in Harriet’s coming-of-age. The shift in the height of the river during the summer months of monsoon can be dramatic, depositing silt carried down from the Himalayas, and partially covering what is left of the floodplain, otherwise engineered and channeled down to the Bay of Bengal. Perhaps the ship’s cargo was on its way to the jute mills in Dundee.

    Recalling Jay-Ger’s invocation of the taskscape, I want to consider a different mode of habitation with the river, or perhaps I should call it wetness. This conception doesn’t delineate space, or where land is livable with its designed order, and water. This indigenous conception involves living in negotiation with wetness, of living across a gradient. This older idea of the Ganga, of a wetness that rises and falls, rather than the ‘normal’ river and flood, was colonised and constructed into the Ganges. The designed construction of the ‘river’, of reinforcing it as a natural object, is a design act for which we are paying the price.

    This is true both ecologically and ontologically. Here I’m thinking with Dilip de Cunha who questions this historical moment of granting a river rights, arguing that rights based ethics is grounded in the clarity of the object, therefore accepting the logic of colonialism by restraining wetness as a contained entity in the form of a river. Physical interventions, which accelerated under British rule, reshaped the river’s ecology, hydrology, and relationships with local communities. The Ganga canal system has had disastrous landscape effects which have been linked with contemporary climate-related displacement, where the canals have prevented silt depositing in the Bay of Bengal, resulting in land erosion in Bangladesh.

    The last scene of the film, perhaps reaches most towards this older conception of the Ganga, where, from the veranda of the house, Harriet looks over the garden wall towards the river, taking a moment to reflect on the cycles of life and death that take place on its banks.