Sonia Sarkissian

The project derives from the visual explorations of a contemporary flâneur. Seen in big parts of the urban environment the membranous fabric metamorphoses the perceptual image of the city. Perceived not as a structural material, but as a transitory object, it becomes an interface between private and public, art and practice. The membrane through its movement and aspiration it animates. It lacks fixity of form, allowing the continual flux of transformation. Habitual and urban rhythms blur, as they seem to merge into sculptural mobility. Its animated form manifests the power of logic of visualization and of the gaze as a way of seeing. The new aesthetics it introduces is characterized by the aesthetics of temporality. Textile design and architecture merge with social practice and art. As such, it transcends the concept of aesthetic autonomy, allowing the replacement of popular materials and shapes into more experimental refinements of form.

Through my work, I point out the significance of the point-of-view, its implied normative perspective and its embodied sense of time and space. I associate the notion of the membrane with the notion of gestural space, “a space, which withholds the actual and suggests the potential”, as H.Lefebvre suggests in “The Production of Space”. As such, it becomes the conceptual framework upon which I reflect my experience of the directly lived space and of the space the imagination seeks to originate. Through these conceptions I examine crossdisciplinary strategies of representation and of making. What happens when the visual, material and syntactic properties are being re-examined in a different context? Under which conditions does the concept of vital materiality emerge and what is its relation to gesture?

Sonia Sarkissian