The Work of Culture

 

The Work of Culture

by Gananth Obeyesekere

Symbolic transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology

The Work of Culture is the process whereby symbolic forms existing on the cultural level get created and recreated through the minds of the people. It deals with the formation and transformation of symbolic forms, but it is not a transformation without a subject as in conventional structural analysis. Furthermore, the work of culture is not confined to deep motivation in the Freudian sense. While the symbolic transformation of the images of the unconscious into the public culture is the main focus of [the lectures in the book], I do not confine myself to this exclusive domain...

Daman Coastline

This is a Map of Daman coastline highlighting the fast transforming environmental features all the way from Bhilad to Nani Daman Fort, created by Vastavikta Bhagat during our field visit for the Environmental Design Studio during June 2022. 

The premise of the studio was to articulate environmental questions for the emerging consolidation of the 12km long coastline of the Union Territory of Daman along the coat of Arabian Sea that is primarily geared towards serving a middle and upper class tourism market; and thereby articulate architectural responses to soften the impacts due to such hardening of the edge. 

On Stories

Dushyant: (shares a meme) "In the end we all become stories."
Me: (In the end) Only powerful people become stories. The remaining become sea-salt.

Spatial Diagrams

Spatial Diagrams
workshop at Wadiyar Centre For Architecture, Mysore
27-29 May 2022

Spatial diagrams help reveal the hidden systems and patterns of social relations within a built form that index historical modes of spatial organization. They may also hold certain cultural codings of ideological beliefs within societies, in other words, institutionalised forms of practices that get encrusted into built form. Such knowledge is essential in order to develop a critical appraisal of the built environment on the one hand, as well as devising contextual and meaningful conditions for inhabitation on the other. The contention of this workshop is that these diagrams can be harnessed off the rhythms of objects, images and stories through which people “produce” their everyday life. These artefacts are not static, rather they move in time and space producing “heterotopic” conditions. A critical engagement with these artifacts allows us to make meaning into these heterotopias and further articulate contemporary arguments for spatial inhabitation. A careful deployment of these artefacts may allow us to articulate new ways of organizing spatial relationships in space.

How can these ideas within the built environment be extracted, appreciated and harnessed towards spatial processes? This workshop will focus on deciphering building grammars, and formulating architectural languages that generate possibilities for the experimentation of innovative spatial types that compliment, interrogate as well as critically inform the practices of inhabitation in a given place. These possibilities shall be expressed as a series of diagrams that encapsulate the spirit of place and their spatial dispositions.


Methodology
· Creating an archive of stories, objects and images (physical) that indicate their understanding of the town of Mysore
· Making of collage to articulate spatial arguments
· Spatial Diagrams: Translation of collages into material manifests

Deliverables
· Archive of the place
· Collage iterations
· Spatial Models



Schedule

DAY 1. 27 May 2022, Fri

Session 1 / 11 am to 1:30 am
Introduction: The Location of Place

Session 2 / 2:30 to 4:30 pm
Place as Archive: Stories, objects and Images

Session 3 / 5 pm to 7 pm
Spatial Translations: Collage as Method*


DAY 2. 28 May 2022, Sat

Session 4 / 9 am to 11 am
Making Collages and Spatial Arguments

Session 5 / 11.30 to 1.30
Finalisation of Collages and Extraction of Spatial Values

Session 6 / 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm
Material Translations: Model as Diagram*

Session 7 / 5 pm to 7 pm
Conceptual Models Iterations


DAY 3. 29 May 2022, Sun

Session 8 / 9 am to 11 am
Refinements and Spatial Articulations

Session 9 / 11:30 am to 1:30 pm
Space Syntax Scale

 

Archive as Home

If the condition of home is an imprint of collection of all things that help us find ourselves, and resonate with the world at large, could the making of archive be home-making / mirror the process of home-making itself? I still need to consider , rather reconsider if the title must be reversed, that is - to say 'Home as Archive' - but at this point of time, I am almost confident that hoe is not an archive, the homes that we occupy together with others (other to mean those who are not like us, and those who therefore do not think like us) - the home can therefore never reflect individuals purely. When people collect, they hold absolute agency of including precisely those things that give meaning to their lives and existence. Here of course, I am thinking of archive through a personalised act of collection - where the archive is not a general archive, but an accumulation of those things that matter to the collector. The archive in which the collector is able to mirror his/her self is thus a representation of home, for it sets the coordinates and conditions to feel comfort and security of containing a world view which cannot be necessarily challenged. 

"What is a screen Now-a-days?" by Francesco Casetti

On scientific thought

On Theory and Interdisciplinarity

Marxism

Earlier notes on my attempts to understand 'Who is a Marxist'?

Cultural Retrofits \ Insert Exhibition, 2014