Architectures of elusion: Narrating the plurality of political spaces

Abstract

In this research, I question how architecture positions itself in today's politically charged and multi-layered reality. To establish this process of inquiry, I borrow the concept of the thick present that Donna Haraway uses to describe the complex accumulation of economic crises, political tensions, social problems, and ecological hazards in the Anthropocene. In the political dimension of the thick present, I deal with protest, one of the most prominent spatial manifestations of politics, in order to investigate the potentials of architecture outside its traditional practices and to discover what it can and cannot respond to. I suggest that protests, beyond their dominant representations that often appear as instantaneous and intense reactions, are political knots that can reveal the political complexity of the thick present, and can be a research ground on which speculations can be made through the pluralities they contain. In this sense, the 20th Feminist Night March is the case of this thesis, which has a significant place in Turkey's political climate and has been subject to various political and spatial oppressions. In this design research, I propose a practice in which architecture deviates from its conventional design processes and takes on a narrative identity that both reveals the plurality of the thick present and produces spatial criticism. This identity, which I define as narrating architecture, is built on Haraway's suggestion of staying in the thick present through storytelling. The architectural framework I have established, following feminist scholars such as Jane Rendell, Jill Stoner, Jennifer Bloomer, Penelope Haralambidou, and Sepideh Karami, proposes a critical approach to architecture's tendency to intervene and find solutions. Here, architecture as a speculative, unrevealed, and elusive narrator distorts traditional representations of protest and is interested in representing its plurality without violently exposing it. I propose two design experiments; The Condenser and The Disinherited Fitment, under the name "Architectures of Elusion." These feminist, minor, plural, elusive, fictional, allegorical and ironic architectures describe the plurality of the 20th Feminist Night March through speculative narration; they disrupt meta-narratives by proliferating micro-narratives. The model, called The Condenser, works based on the audio recording taken from Cihangir Street, where the protest took place. Dealing with the thickness of the Feminist Night March, The Condenser appears as a speculator architecture in the form of a narrator. Strategically engaging with states of visibility and invisibility, the model offers an open-ended experiment in critically engaging with political spaces. The other experiment, The Disinherited Fitment, presents two temporally separated speculative drawings that produce narratives through architectural elements regarding a case of police brutality that occurred the same evening after the protest. These drawings allegorically criticize the hegemonic dynamics in spaces that exclude marginalized forms of existence through the infrastructure units that sustain the built environment in the region. For this reason, The Disinherited Fitment adapts to the denied and discarded states of architecture and reveals their testimonies about a case of police brutality. These design experiments engage critically with both architecture and the political dynamics of protest spaces. While revealing the spatiality of politically charged events, they offer a minor practice of spatial critique by disrupting oppressive political realities through the creativity inherent in reinterpretation. As a result, "Architectures of Elusion," together with its theoretical background, establishes a ground for questioning how architecture can disrupt traditional norms and take part in the political dimension of the "thick present".