Architectural de-placing: walking as collaborative transgression

Abstract

The paper develops a way of thinking about the transgression of place through movement –– a term we might call “de-placing.” I consider de-placing through the walking performance Brasilia (2015), created by dancer Philip Adams and the architect Matt Bird, both based in Melbourne, Australia. Brasilia was put together during a short residency in the capital city. The work comprises Adams taking a pre-dawn walk clad in white swimming briefs, jerry-rigged Mickey Mouse-ears and carrying a work-a-day briefcase. Documentation of the work, taken by Bird and an enlisted local photographer, shows Adams along deserted highways, past modernist icons of the capital complex and encountering small groups of early risers. I briefly locate Brasilia within contemporary discourses of walking, and specifically at the mediation of walking-based work through the image. I then turn to how the collaborative relationship between Adams and Bird falls outside of instrumentalized understandings of partnerships between dance and architecture: for example, that might lead to a set design or a performance within a completed building. Instead, their collaboration foregrounds open-ended research and itinerant explorations that are founded on play, friendship and a capacity to engage in risk through unmotivated sharing. I argue that there is a transgressive nature to their working together that makes de-placing possible. In this sense, methods and effects are linked. The paper draws from interviews with the performers and is part of larger research into non-standard collaborations between dancers and architects. While time, space and the body continue to be points of contact between the disciplines, the motivations and intentions underlying contemporary collaborations comprise an expanded field that, importantly, can be a resource for rethinking architectural practice. In de-placing, Brasilia opens architecture’s transgressive capacities through a paradigm of open-ended collaboration.