Fluid Architectures – Poetics of the Self

About Fluid Architectures – Poetics of the Self

Fluid Architectures – Poetics of the SelfNew performative site-specific installations confer the Self’s Poetics in phenomenological spaces that are subtly participatory, across three galleries. Where do the poetics of the Self reside, sheltered in the ways of being that house us? In Outsider, 2026, Lihong Bai’s performance and performance films enact transmigratory journeys, through Inner Mongolia’s Kubuqi desert, China to London, echoing the cyclical human sheep kinship of her shepherding childhood homeland. See her film still above, shepherding from desert, to grassland and urban ecologies. Yet, home proves illusive, a Foucauldian heterotopia, displaced through accelerated urban-rural change and diasporic global travels. Lujane Pagganwala’s Pagemaster’s Ballad, 2026, is an intermedia sensorial space of sound, smell, touch, taste and sight. Poetic texts, her own and David Kirshner's from Pagemaster, punctuate children's tents. She reenvisions Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, through a global lens. Vincenzo Muratore’s White Womb Series’ paper-thin marble fragments form one room diorama sculptures that, when struck with light, illuminate to reveal yet partially conceal, cyanotype texts and images. They embody Jungian psychological spaces, self-reflective spaces to discover the Self’s strata, analogous to a house, as cite by Bauchelard. Identity is fluid, everchanging, like desert winds and global tides, transient over time and place, as personal and cultural facets shift, intermingle, Self-reconstructing through life’ ongoing experiences.