Un-claiming Experience of an Old Drawing

Investigating the implexuous relation between embodiment and unclaimed experience, my research in pursuit of unclaimed experience in architectural drawing unfolds as a series of embodied and situated experiments in the form of drawings, drawing structures/plays, and drawing acts. Accordingly, this artefact that I am currently developing by working on a set of particular ‘aged’ drawings - fragments of a set of Ottoman miniatures, is initiated with a speculative act that deliberately escapes a referential narrative and explores experiences that escape any immediate understanding. Thus, my projective drawing device questions the referential realm attributed to reality located behind the picture plane, and intends to unfold an unclaimed experience oscillating between optic and haptic fields of investigations between the picture plane and the eye.

In order to creatively explore potential unclaimed fields between the optic and the haptic experiences and thus to welcome unforeseeable trajectories that are also determined by the uncertainty of the material, I expand the vocabulary of drawing tools, instruments, and materials; and re-embody the fragments of the miniatures through materials that are rather difficult to control, such as vaseline, olive oil, ink, and raffia. As the drawing device seeks to explore the haptic intimacy between the picture plane and the eye (rather than the referential realm attributed to reality located behind the picture plane), it seduces the drawer to approach closer towards the drawing plane (almost urging the drawer to become one with the drawing plane), rather than facing the drawing plane with a certain distance as in perspective.

Through this research method, I critically distance myself from a strictly referential narrative based on conventional models of references, and propose a mnemonic and situated reading on the various temporalities of a drawing. I hope to unfold an alternative reading on miniatures that do not necessarily refer chronologically back to pre-perspective but suggest other anachronic spatio-temporalities and exchanges.