Capter l'hypersensibilité de l’espace

“Capter l’hypersensibilité de l’espace” is a project which Dr. Falma Fshazi (Historian, Political Anthropology, member of the NEWROPE Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation) and Karine Dana (Architect, Independent Videographer) are currently developing. Their paths crossed at the architecture practice 51N4E in Brussels, and this encounter triggered their interest in exploring the built environment as a multiplicity of sites for transdisciplinary research on change and transformation. Both Falma and Karine were intrigued by the levels of autonomy and different temporalities of architecture and urban planning projects versus associative, cultural projects and research in social sciences.

Their project explores the combination of such temporalities and focuses on space and relations in architecture that are captured primarily through the camera and the field notebook (journal de terrain). These two mediums are considered as both project and research tools. The work develops on site and in duo. The first phase is about dealing with being captured in what this project calls ‘the hyper-sensibility of space’. The second part of the work is the editing space where camera and field note-book become tools of social science as much as of culture and architecture. In this new space images, subjects, relationships, perspectives, the physical and the invisible, the mental and the emotional are intercrossed to analyze and activate the hyper-sensibility of space.

Our era is essentially marked by fragmentation. Approached as a sum of fragments, pieces, scattered over time, the video production together with the field notebook opens up to new and different ways of being and writing. The assembly of the fragments constitutes an indeterminate story, a new construction, a new chain of values. On the one hand, it self-generates a story, a story of transformation. On the other hand, it is a productive, performative and critical act. An act of tension that is added to the project itself, an act of alignment, of positioning, of setting in motion another world. It also amounts to activating parallel realities, forgotten realities, historical realities, and emotional realities.

The project “Capter l’hypersensibilité de l’espace” is activated on three different levels:

1) Research: Organisation of a series of workshops gathering experts, researchers practitioners in discussing these two mediums, their combination and intercrossing perspectives. Anthropologists, filmmakers in the field of architecture and experts with a direct interest and involvement in the subject are invited to approach the organisers for collaboration and an exchange of ideas and experience.

2) Practice: Case studies in collaboration with various practices in capturing a lot of invisible and sensitive values ​​that can paradoxically be both lost or forgotten. Following the work internally, this project enables building a critical space, a space of revelation, another common space. Outside, on site, this project makes possible confronting realities and confronting oneself, broadening perspectives, making present, engagement and thick description.

3) Pedagogy: Collaboration with the NEWROPE Spring 2021 Studio Offenbach. The students will be provided with insights on the two mediums (film and field notebook) and will be involved in exercises related to their use and their potential in revealing the hypersensibility of space. The exercises aim at enabling students to work with technical aspects as much as with a series of other variables, as well as fragmentation and permanent change. The collaboration with Studio Offenbach is a first step in scrutinizing the potential of combining these two means for educational purposes in architecture and urbanism.

– Ongoing project
– Click here to see some work of Karina Dana
– Dr. Falma Fshazi and Karine Dana
– Contact: fshazi@arch.ethz.ch