On Autobiographical Lenses: from Perspective to Performance

Abstract

A lens is an instrument one looks through to bring new perspectives into focus, enabling the transformation of experience from a magnified self-concentrated space to a wide horizon.
In A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, Joyce posits autopsia, or “seeing for oneself,” as the only mode of knowledge, rather than a blind acceptance of traditions, beliefs and social norms. Joyce’s myopic observer-protagonist is marked by a Cartesian self-reflexiveness and by a modernist self-conscious creation of self. The structure of the self, its house of being, is created in A Portrait mainly through the epiphanic gaze. Epiphanies may be regarded as the building blocks of self and narrative; they comprehend an architectural configuration of vision. It is in the visionary moment that the kaleidoscope of the self crystallizes. The fictional prospect of the novel is made up of multiple viewpoints; the protagonist, moving in the space of the text, is affected by the presence of these manifold perspectives: the space or magnetic field of A Portrait is charged by epiphanies.
In the studio we taught autobiographical lenses were introduced as surgical tools of imagining and creating focal spaces.
The paper will be divided into three sections, according to the genealogy of the studio. In the first one we will unfold the point of departure: self -photographed images and autobiographical texts as the source of architectural praxis. The second section will address the alchemical process whereby personal is transformed into public. In the last section we analyze the metaphorical intervention on-site along the periphery of the Old City walls. The loaded location demanded from each student to grapple with the challenge posed by a shared physical territory as the site of conflict. Finally, we cast a retrospective glance at our teaching experience.

[In the menu on the right, ARTICLE TOOLS, in "Supplementary Files" link you can download the .pdf presentations of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design students, related to the design studio on Autobiographical Lense, developed in Jerusalem in 2012].