Domestic space: drawing bodies in motion

The current pandemic has brought into focus shifts in spatial paradigms from the binaries of inside-outside, home-workplace, to networks of material assemblages. It has created opportunities for new ways to connect with communities beyond the normal frameworks of the design studio, discipline and institution that would not ordinarily have been accessible. The physical space of home has begun to take on new meaning as work/life/children/family all, fold into one (place).

Throughout the pandemic Luke Brown, dancer and choreographer, has used the front room of his house as a makeshift studio, where every Sunday during lockdown he has choreographed a series of improvised dances.  Cameras trace Brown’s movements which are transmitted across the country via Zoom, through which ‘life drawing’ takes place, mediated by digital networks. This remote practice transforms spatial relationships and dialogues between ‘life model’, artists, space and the scale of the body. The work explores the performances, interactions and gestures that take place between the dancer and participants. It explores the screen’s digital presence as a site in the theatre of everyday life where all bodies matter, to ask: what new modes of interaction can be developed? And how might the habits, gestures, structures and conventions of architectural practice change?

This paper uses domestic modes of enquiry to critique architectural practice; it critiques the materials, tools and gestures through which it is made. The work rethinks architecture, as philosopher Elizabeth Grosz suggests, through the “rotations, convolutions, inflections and torsions of the body itself,” in order to support an engagement with the matter of our bodies; the materiality of the body, the images and stories we carry, the gestures we make and the materials that surround us.