Cartography – morphology – topology: exhibition 2010

I 2004 a Summer School was established on the Greek island of Hydra. The was to be the basis of research-based morphological and topological studies, which have since taken place for 4 weeks of every year.
Starting with Hydra’s topography different ways of considering topology were developed. The work was approached from a new angle every year through a series of associated questions, resulting in an extensive body of drawings describing the various discourses raised.
The developed observational forms reflected in the collected body of drawings constitute a topological landscape with a great many parallels to the architectural context in which we find ourselves today, and which may be described in time and space as a complex traversed by forces, informations, and synergies; expressing and configuring varied and ambiguous significances through constellations both real and virtual.
Creating and developing topological emergence as a passage between cartographic appropriation and creative becoming while simultaneously lifting the material out of its mimetic reference, makes room for the of a movement towards a production of meaning as well as a basis for initiating architectonic practices.
We seek to provoke a level of operation between the real and the virtual from this body holding the sensing body as its pivot along with the phenomenology of the object; omnipresently considering and shaping virtual constructions. This questioning of architectonic discourse is capable of instrumentalizing ambiguity and opening up to a topological architecture; working with fundamental structures within a given space and its places, positions, relations, orders, levels, dimensions, energies, and processes as a new field of possibilities.
This work has led to more observations on space, scale, and representation; on the surface and depth of the drawings; on the upfolding of the plane; on plasticity and changes of state; on movement, space, time, and information; on regimes of signs and observations on scale related to domains and relations; and to how often-present, effective events interweave actions into force-fields and modes of effect. This supple viewpoint sought to create a topology from which to extract experiences reaching beyond the topography of Hydra, and capable of bringing together numerous levels into an open work; an interaction between form and action; a form of architecture of the event.