Architectures of Elusion: Thickening the Site of the Protest by Allegorical Narratives of Othered Beings

Abstract

This paper explores design research tactics for understanding the plurality of micro-narratives that protest spaces embody and their physical, social, and psychological articulated connotations. Here, architecture’s narrative identity tackles the 20th Feminist Night March in Istanbul through Donna Haraway’s (2016) discussions of the ‘thick present’ in the context of political spaces, Jacques Ranciere’s (2010) suggestion of fiction to tackle political impositions, along with feminist modes of storytelling including Ursula K. Le Guin’s (1996) ‘Carrier Bag Theory’, and Jennifer Bloomer’s (1993) allegorical strategies. This narrative identity employs multitudes of meanings such as abstraction, parody, and mockery; thereby challenging the existing canonical meanings that are assigned to political space. Two architectural agencies were employed as the methods of this research: The Condenser is a narrator, a piece of minor architecture, and a speculator that operates on the micro issues drawn from the thickness of the 20th Feminist Night March. Here, model making betrays architectural expectations and becomes the field of research and feminist storytelling, deriving meanings from neglected and othered places. The Disinherited Fitment is an allegorical drawing diptych, that expands on a case of police violence that occurred after the main protest. The diptych attunes to the disowned states of architecture by delineating a spatial critique of the hegemonic dynamics in architectures that exclude othered/marginalized bodies and forms of existence. These design experiments engage critically with both architecture and the political dynamics of protest spaces. By revealing the spatiality of politically charged events, they offer a minor practice of spatial critique that disrupts oppressive political realities through the creativity inherent in reinterpretation. They propose a ground for questioning how architecture can disrupt traditional norms and take part in the political dimension of the ‘thick present.’