Approaching Bonding Bonding with a roof beam through bonding with a dog

This project unpacks a hands-on approach to the notion of bonding, speculating on its corporeal specificities with regard to its emotive nature. Through drawing and model-making, I choreograph bondings, offering the term ‘near-bonding’, artefacts that come as close as possible to a bonding. Each near-bonding has a corporeal specificity and opens the spatial into discussion through this specificity. I put forward drawing and model-making as media to provide an access to bonding’s spatial intents. I aim to discuss a position of coming nearer to understanding a tangible corporeality by testing out bonding’s specific relational space in time.

Bonding describes the growth of my natural attachment to another, into a spatial corporeality. Although bondings durationally happen in natural ways, this research unfolds bonding as an instrumental practice. In that sense, a ‘bonder’ is offered as an allegorical subject that approaches bonding through ‘sink/sync with space’ through practicing bonding through her/his instruments.

Bonding interests me in the way that it offers the position of a ‘bonder’ to rethink design practice in architecture. Rendell (2003) distinguishes between an everyday action and the same action’s refinement into a critical spatial practice through choreographed methodologies. Rendell’s (2003) text offers me a chance to rethink the allegorical subject ‘bonder’ as an artist that choreographs and tests a bonding who by doing so performs bonding as a critical spatial practice.

This research holds on to my naturally-grown bondings with a dog at an archeological site in Turkey and a roof beam in my temporary residential address in Brussels and allows them to offer an allegorical narrative for a bonder’s choreographed bonding. I develop the term ‘near-bonding’ as a space to discover this choreography and propose it as simultaneous spaces of bonding and design. I suggest that when the allegorical subject ‘bonder’ is bonding, s/he is simultaneously re-imagining space. In that sense, ‘bonding like a bonder’ offers a way to a spatial formation.

Each near-bonding studies the phenomena of bonding through mediums drawing and models [ 1–8 ]. During these studies bonding is choreographed, the architect/researcher growing into the place of the bonder, the act becomes instrumental generating spatial corporealities. In that sense, my investigation departs from a study of a dog or a roof beam and becomes its own practice. Constructing methodologies, this study defines a design-driven research. Drawings and making models are produced to serve as corporeal specificities on how the phenomena ‘bonding like a bonder’ can offer ways to re-imagine space.

Near-bondings

In this project, I use sinking and to be in sync as allegorical doubles: sinking’s meaning is multiplied with the meaning of to be in sync, to be in sync’s meaning is multiplied with the meaning of sinking. Both meanings making sense simultaneously, when I write sinking then it also bears the meaning of to be in sync for me. This project proposes to search for the limit condition of bonding within the realm of this allegorical double.

A fossil is an example for me to contemplate further on sinking/ to-be-in-sync double. When I look at pictures of a fossil, I see a stone composed of different bodies that aggregated into an entity, a new durational togetherness. Throughout billions of years, the substance of the bodies fallen on the earth sink into the medium, earth, and each other. I am intrigued by how through sinking into each other, they are becoming the medium itself as a fossil. This is also where I detect to be in sync with space happens, proceeding to the new durational medium, the fossil. I consider fossil as a phenomenal entity that bears the corporeal spatiality of bonding.

Near-bonding no.1

The idea of the first near-bonding occurred to me through an associative link with Spoerri’s ‘trap-paintings’. Trap-paintings ‘trap’ the objects exactly as they have been placed on the table during/after being used, by gluing them on the surface they stand. Spoerri then rotates the horizontal surface 90 degrees to display it vertically. Through trapping, Spoerri acquires ‘an anecdotal topography of chance’ (Spoerri, 2016). I understand this idea of topography as an attempt to maintain a realm of attachment.

Leaning on Spoerri’s trap-paintings, ‘bond-drawing’ as a near-bonding begins with putting my own sketch of the roof beam on the table, enlargening it to 1:1 scale on transparent paper, with regard to keeping precision in terms of my impression of the roof beam. Through reiterated acts of tracing, cutting and taping new transparent layers, the bond-drawing’s presence lies in-between a drawing and a model [ 1–3 ].

Near-bonding no.2

I work on this near-bonding in a direct link with the notion of fossilization. In this choreography, I make ‘fossil’s in aim to approach bonding, and call them ‘bond-ile’s. Each bond-ile contains a leftover piece from a vegetable/fruit that I have recently eaten, paper mache, hair and gel medium to bond them together [ 4–5 ]. In each bond-ile, bonding sets as a chemical process.

Near-bonding no.3

I produce ‘bond-graph’ drawings in aim to unfold the spatial sensations in bond-iles. I use a video-recording of me turning a bond-ile around in my hand as basis of the drawing, in curiosity to generate a graphic output of my bonding as a tangible survey. Putting screenshots from the video-recording next to each other, I trace surfaces through drawing reiteratively and applying molding paste in each layer. Although each layer gives rise to a collapse of depth, through the use of molding paste the layers bond with each other to set a captivating depth in the surface of the drawing ‘bond-graph’ [ 6–8 ].

The making of the near-bondings gives me an access to the making of the spatial intent of bonding. In near-bondings, as I approach bonding, surfaces crystallize as tangible skins. As I make, I sense a spatial depth in surfaces and skins. The tangible quality of each near-bonding is curious to me as it also entails another bonding by itself.

This project is my experiment to reimagine space, re-desiring materiality of space and body. Through this project, I aim to discuss my position in approach to the notion of bonding as a spatial practice that opens architectural practice to discussion, through generated corporeal spatialities.