The Distance of the Earth

The initial brief was (fairly) simple. Can a detail save the world? A journey to an unknown location with an unread book in my hand. It was about making and exploring; finding ways of doing architecture differently. No so much the what, rather the how. Sooner, questions arose. How are current relationships shaped between humans and the Earth, and how can we relearn or reimagine more authentic practices? Is architecture a purely visual practice? What is the connection between architecture (culture), dust (nature), and the human (body)? How does the world look through dust?

In a time of environmental destruction, biodiversity loss, and climate change, we tend to overlook things happening unintentionally next to us. In a culture and economy, dominated by neoliberal approaches, most things and beings outside the visual-pictorial world remain either as granted objects or as completely forgotten. Accidentally, filthy, and unwelcome in most places, dust troubles our perceptions of nature and how it is (re-)produced through the fetishistic dominance of the visual image. My incipient travel brings me to Graz, reading “A Wild Thing” by Hilde Bouchez. The architectural exploration begins around an abandoned site, a former paper mill within a housing area. On behalf of dust, the thesis follows the question of how spaces can be read like texts and how texts can be constructed like spaces. The main project becomes a situated writing with different real and not-so-real experiences, jumping between an allegorical space and the existing site in Graz. It attempts to develop an authentic representation within the debate about the dichotomy of nature/culture and dynamics of the Earth. Based on the writing, a physical public intervention responds to the site as a performative space and invitation into our world full of tiny particles. A moment when in a darker void — music, other people, and from time to time a light beam — all intersect. At this exact moment, it might be a blur between artificial and natural. This muddled-research approach draws influence from performative writings of Jozef Wouters, dreamy links to Italo Calvino’s “The Distance of the Moon” and embodied writings of McKenzie Wark.