Urban Opera

Our site for the semester is a bend in the Seine River, distinguished by a vast history, changing conditions of use and climate, and a diverse set of industrial, human and non-human habitations. Located just outside the city of “official” Paris, this is a “fallow” place, a peri-urban site in a territory concurrently challenged by the shifts of global interests and received by radically local circumstances. After an intensive period of study and research, the first goal of the studio is to generate an original language to narrate its quintessential aspects, by deploying techniques used primarily by landscape architecture to identify and express indeter-minate dynamic networks: a practice known within the discipline as mapping. By drawing and constructing, we discover the latent rules which govern appearances and disappearances of objects and events in ecological landscapes, and struggle to represent them. These comprise systems operating both within and against other systems, inarticulate fluctuations of effects on other effects, all contributing an understanding of the presence of time through things and non-things. 

The second goal of the studio, like the first, is one of expression, one which challenges academic conventions of silent and static manifestation of work as inadequate to the communication of urgent ephemera. In the embrace of the temporal, the studio stretches the typical studio product to include narrative, sound, and action, as well as more conventional two and three dimensional exploration. The final product of the semester is the production of an opera: a performance in which site is conceived as object of study, provocateur of imagination, protagonist of action and intention. All these issues are brought together in the format of a live performance articulating mappings and narratives, incorporating recordings and fabricated music, and projecting possibilities emanating from the site and from the act of drawing itself, in an open interdisciplinary form.