Souvenirs of the senses - Handdunes

This series of works "Handunes" were in response to a curatorial premise that my colleagues, Patrick West and Valerie Jeremijenko produced for a invited workshop and in tensive fabrication. The premise was to re-think the notion of the souvenir and how things are mad in a place by starting with a sensation of place and building an object (reverse engineering it) from that sensation or experience. this works against the notion of an miniature icon. these objects and documented processes were exhibited at the end of the one week intensive workshop.

Souvenirs of the senses

Souvenirs of the senses: collaborative and cross-artform makings

Souvenir hunters are often limited in their selection of souvenirs to objects that evoke an iconic and/or generic relationship to place. For example, a small-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower might substitute for a whole range of other more personal responses to the sensory experience of being in Paris. This paper reports on a collaborative and cross-artform five-day workshop, “Souvenirs of the Senses”, conducted in Qatar in early 2013 as part of Tasmeem Doha: Hybrid Making, a biennial international art and design conference. Two of the three workshop leaders, Patrick West and Jondi Keane, were Australian-based visitors whereas workshop leader Valerie Jeremijenko is permanently based in Qatar. There were five workshop participants from a diverse range of international and Qatari backgrounds. One of the conference themes, “Made in Qatar”, heightened our attention to what it means to be spending time in, and making things in, one place as opposed to any other place. What did it mean to be making something in a country where so many things have to be imported? Building on this line of thought, the second conference theme, “Hybrid Making”, suggested possibilities for undoing traditional modes of souvenir making as part of the creation of more complex objects that might be sutured to the singular experiences of place that happen when a.) established regimes of tourism are disrupted, and b.) experiences of place are curated via a focused awareness of the operations of the senses as sustained within our collaborative, cross-artform workshop environment. What attracts our attention is how objects ripe for “souveniring”, when they are considered as perceptual systems, suggest new ways of experimenting with the fabrication of objects and of artistic and individual relationships to place, and further, how hybrid souvenirs affect the way in which a place is re-membered (put together) and re-made in memory.

Words and things: souvenirs of over-site/over-sight for place-making

This paper addresses the problem of making things in a given place (Qatar), and asks how anticipations and memories of place contribute to practice-based manoeuvres of place-making. Flying across time zones and travelling through sites suggests aspects of place-making that would draw upon both a notion of meteorites coming to earth and an awareness of the sensory consequences of global travelling. What this experience also suggests is an ‘over-sight’ (‘over-site’) in how travellers remember a place for themselves, and how they re-member it for others in the form of souvenirs. Going to a place might often default to an envisioning of pre-emptive or imaginary souvenirs in anticipation of the destination; thinking about what a place might be like is hard to separate from what we think we will eventually take away from it. Thus, the idea to be explored is how we might ‘make in to place’ as much as we ‘make something in-place,’ which perhaps results in ‘making some thing into a place’. Etymologically, souvenir already suggests this in its derivation from Old French: ‘to remember, come to mind.’ How does one ‘come to remembering’ in a place that, like all planetary places, will always be both global and local? Perhaps it depends on how one lands in a place…. Meteoroids remain in orbit around a place: nascent souvenirs always above the horizon, un-made place-makings. Meteors come closer to landing but still, by definition, burn up in the atmospheres of the new place. Meteorites, though, land: they suggest what we mean by the human element of ‘makings in-/to place.’ Travelling from somewhere, to somewhere yet to be fully determined, meteorites (people and/or words and/or senses) reflect the dispersion and compression of sensory (thing-based) and word-based experiences of place. Drawing on the work of Paul Hopper, Paul Carter, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Serres, William Desmond and Julia Kristeva, the paper concludes that words evoke a place in which the present might take place, and that the senses evoke a present in which place might take place.

Qasmonauts

Qasmonauts skin––skein––senses At night, or darkly through glass: lunar Qatar––moon-struck--touched by the moon, Nation of qasmonauts, furling and unfurling, inland seas Qasmo-nautical (space ships!), flights of falcons––fonts of fancy. Skin of sky, skein of sand, skin of skein, space On my tongue… sand-grit in the lines of my hands. Writing gets in your eyes. Patrick West

Souveniring the Sydney Opera House

The Sydney Opera House attracts over four million visitors each year to experience its architecture, events and cultural narratives. This experience consciously engages tourists in a constructed spatial encounter, in which the tourist has the opportunity to experience the architecture of this canonical modernist building. This experience often culminates with the purchase of a souvenir, a seemingly innocuous act, but one that is highly revealing of the interrelation between the tourist's experience, the architecture and the souvenir. There has already been much scholarly work on the Sydney Opera House, discussing its architecture, the historical and political context of its commission and its symbolic meaning within the City of Sydney. Less attention however has been paid to the relationship between architecture, experience and memory, as embodied by the souvenir. The tea towels, snow domes, table lights and key rings which depict the Sydney Opera House are, as Celeste Olalquiaga states "static and idealized blueprint... of an experience." This raises debate over what exactly is souvenired; is it the building? The experience? Cultural cachet? What can be revealed about the architecture of the Sydney Opera House, through its souvenirs? Architecture, like souvenirs is party to questions of representation, abstraction and scale. By drawing upon the work of Stewart and Olalquiaga, on the experience of souvenirs, the essay takes an architectural position from which to discuss the way models as objects of architecture and souvenir miniatures are the material representations which commemorate and facilitate a dynamic and ephemeral experience of this building. In this way revealing souvenirs as more than markers of travel, but as Stewart asserts, containers of the cultural narratives, desires and myths, which surround such an iconic architectural destination