Inscriptions

Inscriptions is a collaborative project from the Bartlett School of Architecture and Open City Documentary Festival.

A constellation of sites and situations.

It began in the midst of one of those lockdowns. Trapped in London the world had become small and we developed an online screening programme that could allow us to travel to different sites and situations across the globe. Artists and filmmakers could join from wherever they needed to present their work in the context of an architectural school, allowing for new understandings of spatial conditions and methods of situated architectural research. We were thinking through Bartlett professor Jane Rendell’s term of critical spatial practice – a way of questioning the world around us through forms of fine art:

If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time – the conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event.[1]

A set of films that allow us to think in new ways about these locations.

In this collaboration we have been interested in how the moving image can be used to detect an event, document a site, and then reconstruct a situation. This form of practice has been used most notably by the German filmmaker and author Harun Farocki. Images are found or re-found, used outside of their original context to reveal new meanings; projects use metaphor and allegory to build arguments; text and image are combined to enforce a position or to complicate and diverge from each other. These techniques offer possibilities of making visible that which is not, in seeing sites anew.

 A collection of writings that help to reveal methods of situated research for these films.

Farocki used the editing desk and the writing table in parallel – as a filmmaker and as a writer they became interchangeable in both the making of a film and his written reflections. The contributions for this journal allow seven filmmakers to extend our conversations from the Bartlett Screening Room, to think through a spatial lens, to offer up access points to their techniques of situated research.

This idea of research as being situated is a way of operating that makes clear both the particularities of the chosen site and the specifics of the maker. There is an understanding here of American author and philosopher Donna Haraway’s partial perspectives and limited locations – objective vision does not exist. Jane Rendell’s work builds upon these ideas of spatial subjectivity through the maker’s own critical awareness: ‘…the notion of situatedness allows us to address the particularities of a site and our relations to it, and may lead us to address material, political, and emotional qualities of our own subjectivities from both spatial and temporal perspectives…’.

Inscriptions presents a series of reflections on processes of situated research and film making as the writers respond to their individual investigations of a particular site. Their methods present situated knowledges, explicit unravelling’s of how our reading of a location can be transformed through the positions of the maker. Through this lens, the site is no longer static, but instead can be transformed through the potency of situated research and the making of a film.

In Onyeka Igwe’s text Looking for ‘lost’ archives the artist/researcher takes us on her journey to Lagos to locate a building used to house the Nigerian Film Unit. She writes of how buildings act as protagonists in her film a so-called archive (2020). Her careful research process takes place in the archival space of the British Library and in a series of empty colonial buildings in Lagos and Bristol. These locations become transformed through her situated presence to allow for forgotten and hidden meanings to emerge from these buildings loaded with the weight of Britain’s colonial history.

Film can be a method to map and measure a site, but is not an objective tool, the final object always presents a version of Haraway’s partial perspectives. Kennedy’s film Watching the detectives (2017) takes the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing as its subject. His silent 16mm film repurposes posts from Reddit threads set up to crowdsource clues as to the identity of the bombers. The narrative charts the trajectory of the users investigations and the inherent dangers of how the image text can be used to reorganise a site and to distort a situation. The abandoned subreddit r/findbostonbombers is an archive that allows Kennedy to both find and re-find these images.

Measuring and mapping within filmic methods is expanded upon further in Suneil Sanzgiri’s contribution Un-meshing the world. Photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning are tools well understood within an architectural context, but here these technologies are used as critical methods to reveal unwritten colonial histories. Sanzgiri’s text writes to his film Golden Jubilee (2021) in which he recreates his ancestral home in Goa, allowing his father to return their through a digital reconstruction. There is an evocation here of the techniques of Farocki: archival research, archaeological reconstruction, and allegorical reading.[3] The unseen is revealed through a subversive approach of using technologies against themselves.

Using aesthetics as a technique of return – but in virtual space – is a method also used by Razan AlSalah. AlSalah has spent 5 years making art works inside Google Maps Streetview as a way to allow her to return to Palestinian lands. Her text we are not users reveals colonial systems of image making – from early 20^th century landscape photography of the ‘Holy Land’ through to systems of Google Streetview that rewrite place through the flattening of space. This contribution was written for Inscriptions in 2021-22 and we publish it here with a preface written after October 7^th 2023. Her writing, before and after, offer with explicit clarity how sites and unfixed, narratives are in constant flux, and can be reformed at will by the situated perspectives of different actors.

The idea of who gets to write the history of a site is the focus of Riar Rizaldi’s contribution On Expertise: The Backbone of Tellurian Drama. The text is a transcript of his interview with Rashmat Maulana, a park ranger based at the location of the long abandoned Radio Malabar. Built by the Dutch colonial administration in West Java, the site is the focus of Rizaldi’s film Tellurian Drama (2020). The conversation between park ranger and artist reveals Rizaldi’s methodology of reconstructing contested histories through involved primary research as a way to counteract narratives written by the Dutch colonialists. . Sites shift and change according to who is speaking. Myth and fact are interwoven, it is a view of somewhere by someone, demonstrating how knowledge is situated. Metaphor and allegory are used as tools for writing histories.

Based in London, Kaur Brar’s moving image and performance practice sets out to address how power functions in site specific situations. For Inscriptions she has annotated the deeply personal script from her film Boots on Ground (2021) that details her experiences with the police, racism and violence as a second-generation British South Asian woman in London. Here the original script is repositioned and contextualised within wider histories of British state violence both in the UK and India.

The final contribution from Miko Revereza uses a series of diagrams to plot his personal family history alongside – and on top of – colonial histories of the Philippines. This process was part of the research and making of Nowhere Near (2023), a film that traces Revereza’s decision as an undocumented person to leave the US for the first (and possibly last) time. The diagrams he has contributed for publication in Inscriptions act as editing notes: the sequence of events through the film narrative; notes on sounds and edits; themes in the work; and fragments of text. Revereza conceived of these diagrams as similar to a mangrove swamp, a tangle of interwoven roots, individual organisms forming towards a cohesive whole. This approach has reverberations of how Farocki worked, writing towards the end of his life he described his process:

…instead of designing a film in the way a building is designed I prefer to build a film in the way birds build a nest. [4]

A constellation of sites and situations; a set of films that allow us to think in new ways about these locations; a collection of writings that help to reveal methods of situated research for these films. We hope Inscriptions might act as a guide in thinking film through an architectural lens.

With thanks to UCL Grand Challenges for the seed funding for this project.