ThinkArchitecture

Dark Street

shortlisted for Madrid Abierto 2006

Our proposal consists of a series of spatial installations, scattered fragments of a dark maze, along Paseo de la Castellana and Paseo del Prado.

Reference point for this proposal is the labyrinthine architecture of darkrooms and private cabins in gay venues such as cruising clubs or saunas. Hidden in industrial zones, warehouses or cellars, these architectures exist in almost every major city of the Western world.

In our project we want to use the spatial structure of these dark environments as a modulor system – black coloured labyrinthine spaces in various shapes – to be scattered along the main axis of Madrid Abierto. People will be invited to enter the pieces and move along the narrow corridors to explore what is inside. They will encounter other visitors whom they need to come in close physical contact with to walk past them or find themselves walking in blind alleyways. The lighting inside the boxes will range from semi-dark to dark and will exhibit the various materials and surfaces of cruising environments which they are modelled on. Each labyrinthine structure will be accessible through two entrances, so that visitors can use them almost casually as part of a stroll along Paseo de la Castellana and Paseo del Prado.

Suspended between urban exhibit and performance, our project is not about revealing hidden structures and layers of the city. We do not intend to shed light upon invisible or marginalized economies to make them enter the realm of signification. Nor do we claim to provide for any kind of subversive experience. What interests us in the project proposed for Abierto 6 is to create miniscule situations of encounter between people outside the all-surrounding visual battlefield of signification which the city epitomises. Given the liveliness and the objects on display along the main axis of Madrid Abierto, we consider this the best place to show our work. In other words, we want to stress the critical potential of these mundane encounters as they happen in the dark. We want to turn down the light to allow for a deferral of attention – for a looking away from the objects which are directed at us to be looked at, taken in or being known in a specific way. Instead, the project intends to open up a space of slow movement and uncertainty, a space of non-knowledge, in which visitors are more inclined to wait and see what happens next. Building a space of this kind, we want to emphasise the minute gatherings, the tiny gestures, communications and movements which enable us all to take part in culture other than through attending to given modes of participation.

The project we propose, Dark Street, is a further step in a series of installations which we have developed for sites in different cities including the installation project CruiseScapes for the Art in the Anchorage Festival 2002 in New York (see image) which was a labyrinthine space developed inside the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage. We call our current project Dark Street as it references the materiality, spatial layout and experience of sub-cultural darkrooms and transfers fragmentary pieces of these environments into street life to be experienced by visitors in broad daylight. In this sense, our proposal is meant to disrupt in a twofold manner: Firstly, as a visible physical structure which disrupts the Paseo de la Castellana and Paseo del Prado and, secondly, as a disruption which refers to the realms of performance/performativity and experience.

The materials we intend to use are black coloured wooden panels, partly covered with veneer. These wooden panels will be used for both exterior walls and partition walls and will build the structure of the installation. For some parts of the interior space we also consider to use additional materials such as tiles and textiles. The structure is intended to be constructed on site.

'Mapping of a Cruising Bar'

Published in: Helge Mooshammer: Cruising - Architektur, Psychoanalyse und Queer Cultures
Wien u.a.: Böhlau 2005, ISBN 3-205-77294-6
www.boehlau.at