Space

Curator: Simon Twose

Author of theme: Simon Twose, Katrina Simon

Designer – Architect of Exhibition: Simon Twose, Katrina Simon

NZPQ15 SPACE: RESONANT CITY

The New Zealand contribution to the PQ15 SPACE section focusses on unseen dynamics in the city. A short film and city walk will draw out temporal and material dynamics in Prague and Christchurch, NZ.

1. Film: RESONANT CITY: ELUSIVE PATHSThe potential of the New Zealand landscape to dramatically rupture and shake is subtly infused into NZ architecture; our buildings and cities are actors in an ominous, potential performance.
   A short film will explore the notion of a radically altered city, drawing on the transformations brought about by the Christchurch city earthquakes of 2011. It will explore transient conditions in the city in an evocative visual medium, enabling the viewer to encounter a shifting, performative architectural condition, where Landscape, Architecture and the Body are in complex relation. The intention is for seismicity to become a spatial material in its own right, with a fluid potentiality. This will be structured by a traverse through the city that reveals shifts in materiality; encountering concrete, dust and the adventitious plants that colonise abandoned sites.This is not a vivid disaster movie, but an elegiac, abstracted meditation on occupation, inhabitation and the beauty of collective movement. Multiple material and vegetative conditions speak of underlying ground conditions; plants spring up where former water courses across the land were previously concealed by urban development, buildings tilt and fragment over liquefied, previously secure, earth; dramatic accelerations of the ground transform buildings to clouds of dust.The film is a traverse through constellations of material from Christchurch city. Miniature pieces of landscape: stone, dust, liquefied sand – and architecture: concrete, steel and dust – float within the temporality of the visual narrative. These point to moments of change and resonance in a performance of architecture, landscape and human.

   2. Prague City tour: RESONANT CITY: THE LINE OF LEAST AND GREATEST RESISTANCE

   A city tour will lead participants in a traverse of Prague’s fluvial potential. Tour-goers will become part of an active drawing of flood dynamics that is both revealed and newly created by their collective movement though its spaces. They will experience an alternative dimension of the city through walking and by collectively gesturing at critical moments through the walk, in ways that relate to or evoke the transformations of the city through the dramatic and resisted influx of water. Participants will themselves encounter the city as a form of flood, and line of least resistance, and their collective and individual movements will be recorded as an evocation of this dynamic event.

Film:
This will be a 20 minute short film followed by a chaired 35 minute panel discussion on the themes raised in the film. The panel discussion is open and will be chaired by the authors and two invited guests.
The panel will discuss the intentions behind the film, as they relate to exploring the city through a focus on some of its more extreme and unsettling dynamics, rather than a conventional focus on fixed objects and spaces.

Prague City Tour:
The tour will draw unseen dynamics of the city using the trajectories of tour walkers. All members of the tour must agree to be photographed/videoed for the duration of the tour and for these photographs and videos to become part of a subsequent performance/installation in New Zealand. The curator will provide release forms to be signed by tour participants.

The walking tour will start at Glam Gallas Palace, and move through the city north-east toward the Stefanik Bridge. The tour will venture out to the middle of the bridge before returning to the south eastern river bank. The tour will then move along the river banks back towards the Charles Bridge onto which the tour will advance again to the centre of the bridge, and the river. The participants will then return to the palace, where the tour will officially end. The total distance will be approximately 4km which can be achieved comfortably in the time of 1 hour.

Katrina Simon

Education: BArch (Hons) (Auckland); MLA (Hons) (Lincoln); PhD (Sydney); Teaching activites: Senior Lecturer – Landscape Architecture, Research Centre Staff, Design Research Collaboration, Urban Typologies; Participation in other important exhibition: (2006) ‘Graticule’. Objectspace, Auckland. (2005) ‘Seven Wonders’, Snowwhite, Auckland. (2005) ‘Orb’. Groundfloor Gallery, Balmain. (2004) ‘Map Anatomy’. Groundfloor Gallery. (2003) Chromopolis’. Room 2, Auckland. (2002) ‘Peel’ Artspace, Auckland; Awards: Sills van Bohemen Architects in collaboration with Katrina Simon, Landscape  Architect, Chris Williams, Landscape Architect and Rob Walsham, Jawa  Structures. (2007) Hurstmere Green Design Competition, North Shore City  Council, winners.Simon, K (2006) Urban Gaze AAA Panasonic Design  Award, winner. (Sequinicity).Simon, K (2005)Avant Card 3d project, selected  for exhibition at The Studio foyer, Sydney Opera House, Sydney,Australia  (Coracaleleia).Simon, K (2004)Cavalier Bremworth AAA Design Award,  Open Category (Path of unspecifiable terrain).Rolfe, P, Simon, K, and  Wilkinson A, (2004)Shortlisted for New Zealand Memorial in London Design  Competition: Ministry of Culture and Heritage, New Zealand Government.

Katrina Simon is a designer and visual artist with a background in architecture, landscape architecture and fine art. She has research interests in techniques in cartography, their use in landscape design, urbanity and cemeteries.

Simon Twose

Education: BArch(hons), (Auckland), ANZIA, PhD candidate RMIT; Teaching activites: Senior Lecturer in Architecture, Director of Postgraduate Programmes, VUW; Participation in other important exhibition: Venice Biennale 1991, Venice Biennale 2012, Venice Biennale 2014; Awards: Venice Prize, Venice Biennale 1991, over 15 National architecture Awards

Simon Twose is an architect and academic based in Wellington, New Zealand. His interest is in design research and his recent work explores performances in the design process, particularly in a merging of drawing and building.

Film: RESONANT CITY: ELUSIVE PATHS

(video), Christchurch, New Zealand, Proposal: 2014; Realization: 2015; Author: Simon Twose, Katrina Simon;

Prague City tour: RESONANT CITY: THE LINE OF LEAST AND GREATEST RESISTANCE

(others), Prague, Czechoslovakia, Proposal: 2015; Realization: 2015; Author: Simon Twose, Katrina Simon; Further important collaborators: This is a collaboration between Katrina Simon and Simon Twose.
Members of the tour will also become collaborators.
All members of the tour must agree to be photographed/videoed for the duration of the tour and for these photographs and videos to become part of a subsequent performance/installation in New Zealand.;