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The Attic Project
The Attic Project, September 2003
From 16th till 19th of september 2003 Madeleine Hatz from New York worked in the MFA Painting Department with the students with the space of the Attic. They connected in the attic the two opposite outsidedoors.
Madeleine Hatz about the project:
This project involving the entire group of first year students of the MFA Painting program was to be initiated, evolved and presented within four days in the spaceous attic of "Painting Building" of the Frank Mohr Institute.
To initiate the project, the group and I spent the entire first day up in the attic, getting to know both each other and the space. We talked in order to outline the theoretics and the morals of this undertaking.
The "poetic imagination" in Bachelards sense attributes a certain meaning to the position of the attic, within the stacking order if the floors of a house: basement, groundfloor etc. The same volume by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space) also deals with the notion of "dwelling". This notion implies a sort of personal projection, as for instance in seeing the inside of a sea shell as a huge landscape in which one can dwell*, in the sense of inhabiting, making oneself at home. Our talks evolved around "Intimate immensity", shifts of scale, perspective. I urged everyone to make themselves at "home" in the attic, and to examine the space as potential dwellings or receptacles for imagination and desire.
At the same time, we brought up the idea of the group as a community and the need for Consensus in the decision making process. The striving for unfettered personal freedom could seem in contradiction with the idea of consensus. Is this a paradox or outright utopia? Considering the state of world, I personally feel our human aims these days should be nothing less than reaching for Utopia!
Michel Foucault talks about ?hypertopia?, a marginal space, set aside from society, temporarily or not - set aside - like things in an attic, a parallell society... One student proposed spontaneously to save monkeys from scientific laboratories (where they are subjected to painful experiments), and then them loose to live in the attic.
Another possible reference and inspiration for the students could be French writer Michel de Certeau?s "Practice of Everyday Life", in which he defines space as being formed by movement and activity, ?taking place? in it and through it.
After these talks and some sweeping and housecleaning up in the attic, I left the group to themselves to discuss the project. I asked them to come up with something that they all be excited about, yet none would feel stepped on.
We?d meet again the next morning at 10.
The students had agreed on a tunnel reaching from window to window the whole length of the attic (28 meters) I proposed that the space left over by this tunnel dividing the space lengthwise, be considered ?squatterspace? to be used by all without any order or control. Immediate discussion ensued. This leftover marginal space would be inaccessible to the viewers/visitors but available to the project participants for anarchistic art activity. The idea came up of a "security camera" viewing these unplanned practices. The images would be seen on a b/w monitor inside the tunnel. Drawings were made of how the floor perspective could be faked, by putting a triangular splint underneath the window. The same covering for walls and floor.
The completed tunnel was erected as a bedouin tent with cords stretching over beams in the attic, the white plastic cloth flapping in the wind. It became a windtunnel.The white colored cloth covering both floor and walls completes a sense of loss of left/right and up/down directions as in 2001 A Space Odyssey. At each end of the tunnel a vista opens up, litterally a tunnelvision vista. The access is through an entrance way made out of recycled cardboard boxes stapled and taped together. This short corridor cuts into the tunnel perpendicularly.
At the present time, the project has been inaugurated, and it has been allowed to continue into the fall term. In a very short time, over four days, the group had seemed to form simultaneously with the space they were shaping. The day I left, different camera angles were being discussed, and the possibility of a different monitor. There was some coloractivity on a triangular wall under the beams of the attic, although i do not know if the security camera has gazed in that direction at this time.
It seems as though this was really just the beginning of a further collaboration or a co-labouring, with multiple possibilities of outgrowth.
October 1, 2004
Madeleine Hatz
See also:
The Attic Project Photogallery - 1
The Attic Project Photogallery - 2
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