Windowish Practices, Unreadable Backgrounds and Raw Semiotics. Tracing Minor Architectures and Ecologies of Signs in Women’s Writing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_zarch/zarch.2022186216Keywords:
Alternative Practitioners, Women’s Writing, Repertoire, Body, AffectsAbstract
Minor architectures can be defined as an open set of spatial practices and know-hows based on the agency of bodies. While these practices escape representation, codification or measurement, they have a fertile relation with literature. After framing this relationship, we analyze the work of three women writers (Carmen Martín Gaite, Ali Smith and Toni Morrison) to unveil them as minor spatial and material practitioners. While they have not been trained as architects many women throughout history have practiced and organized space in meaningful and wise ways, and they have become aware of minor spatial knowledges resting at the core of what architecture can be (and do). By inventing forms of embodied writing and material inscription, they have expanded a minor repertoire of spatial practices.
Downloads
References
Bennett, Alice. Contemporary Fictions of Attention: Reading and Distraction in the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
Bloomer, Jennifer. Architecture and the Text: The (s)Crypts of Joyce and Piranesi. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995.
da Silva, Denise Ferreira. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The quest (ion) of Blackness toward the End of the World.” The Black Scholar 44, nº 2 (2014): 81-97.
da Silva, Denise Ferreira. “On difference without separability.” Catalogue of the 32a São Paulo Art Biennial,‘Incerteza viva’(Living Uncertainty) (2016), pp 57-65.
da Silva, Denise Ferreira. “In the raw”, e-flux #93, September 2018.
Deleuze, Gilles. “L’actuel et le virtuel,” in Dialogues (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 2008.
Frichot, Hélène. “Following Hélène Cixous’ Steps Towards A Writing Architecture.” Architectural Theory Review 15, nº 3 (December 2010): 312–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2010.524310.
Gatens, Moira. “The Art and Philosophy of George Eliot.” Philosophy and Literature 33, nº 1 (2009): 73–90. https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.0.0037.
Gosseye, Janina, Naomi Stead, and Deborah van der Plaat. Speaking of Buildings Oral History in Architectural Research. New York, N.Y: Princeton Architectural Press, 2019.
Havik, Klaske. Urban Literacy: Reading and Writing Architecture. Rotterdam: Nai010 Publishers, 2014.
Jalón Oyarzun, Lucía. “Excepción y cuerpo rebelde: lo político como generador de una arquitectónica menor / Exception and the rebel body: the political as generator of a minor architecture.” Doctoral Dissertation, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 2017. http://oa.upm.es/48250/.
Lafontaine Carboni, Julien. “Undrawn Spatialities. The Architectural Archives in the Light of the History of the Sahrawi Refugee Camps.” Architecture and Culture 9, nº 3 (July 2021): 505–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2021.1894063.
Lapoujade, David. Les existences moindres. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2017.
Martín Gaite, Carmen. Desde la ventana. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1987.
Martín Gaite, Carmen. El cuarto de atrás. Madrid: Siruela, 2020.
Middleton, Joyce Irene. “Orality, Literacy, and Memory in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” College English 55, nº 1 (1993): 64–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/378365.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Vintage International, 2004.
Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. Matters of Care Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 2017.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American grammar book.” diacritics 17.2 (1987): 65-81.
Schrijver, Lara. The Tacit Dimension: Architecture Knowledge and Scientific Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2021.
Smith, Ali. How to Be Both. London: Penguin Books, 2015.
Spinoza, Benedictus de. Ethics. London ; New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Stoner, Jill. Toward a Minor Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012.