deSIGNING AND DEFINING INSIGNIFICANT PLACES

Built Event is a series of projects that try to conceive an event through its archived material. A living archeology of insignificant places is prepared while a Built Event is performed: the Built Event finds are recorded material from the works and the results of the works themselves.

The term “κτιστό συμβάν” (ktisto symban = “built event”) was used in order to describe the particular area we locate between a procedure and the procedure’s traces: a built procedure (a theatrical preparation of it), a work of tracing, and the procedure’s resultant traces were considered as equally important parts of the same theatrical approach to ‘insignificant places’. Undefined, abandoned, forbidden places are the most promising places for Built Event’s “accurate”, “scientific” performances. The contributions of each participant are proposed as alternative views of these places, as constructed definitions of the insignificant spots. One may call the selected insignificant places ‘places with no evident definition’. The participation of the invited people consisted in attending a theatrical duration of uneasiness on the spot, on the undefined places themselves, ‘in situ’. The collection of designed results was a collection of different particular places coming out from the same one, in a specific moment. Theatricality in the ‘built event’ projects is conceived as a recording of the specific uneasiness of different way of representing the “same place” in a decisive way that leaves traces. The ‘built event’ projects are abundantly filmed, photographed and otherwise recorded; the remains and the results of the “in situ” works are gathered carefully too.
The workshops are organized by the initiators, the invited people and the participants in the form of a congregation or a provisory school where the people invited interpreted the uneasy condition of a particular place. The congregation of people (initiators, invitees and participants) is committed to give a ‘definitized’ response to this place following their particular way of focusing on it. This focusing, the responses and the traces of the entire procedure, formed a theatrical play that actually constitutes the sum of the work. Every participant deposits his own definition of the selected insignificant place through personal involvement and vision. The deposited constructs derive from people of different disciplines (architects, theorists, historians, curators, philosophers, film directors, mathematicians, literature scholars, artists...) These were presented in various forms and media: architectural designs, processed images, texts, but also talks and recordings, each one in its own set terms. The ‘built event’ works were done in the background of a self recording and vice versa.

The procedure itself is a response to the particularities of the place selected.
The selection of place is neither arbitrary nor the outcome of an analysis: The search for a bridge could not anticipate that two of them could be the final focus at once. In the case of “2 bridges_bulitEvent 2” it happened that two parallel bridges over Tavronitis River were found. The Tavronitis site thus became more important than initially expected after the search principles. This happened also in the Island_builtEvent 1 case and in the following works: the terms under which the place had been searched were abandoned as soon as the place had been found. Then the place constituted the only starting point, setting the persistence of a conceptual theme. The place in its “built event” version is never simply “in itself”. This premise creates a difference in the architecture of any place. It makes a difference in the concept of place in politics too. The very “presence” of the place denies its own metaphysical conception. Presence seemed to be organized (in the ‘built event’s structure) as a heterogeneous accumulation of constructs, with no articulations. The place itself acted as the binding of these accumulated concepts, as is also the case with the pages of a book. The place was defined through this possibility of concurrent maintenance of different versions: it is rechargeable. The place, in its Built Event version, is an active archive.

‘Built event’ came out of this architectonic investigation that began to focus on specific insignificant places. Furthermore, “built event” is conceived as a way of defining places through ‘in situ’ meetings of people and the collection of the material they have contributed. By conception, this “built event” procedure produced works that installed a singular relation between the selected places, their ‘conceptual constitution”, their common witnessing by the group of invitees, and the collection of the visit’s remains in the form of a book. The “built event” strategy was aiming at proposing a particular curatorial work, focused on a concrete locus. The selective editing of meetings and remains created an intended inversion: Focusing on a particular place was finally conceived as a cloud of different approaches to something missing: the place; the focused place, through this focusing, appeared blurred again, lost in an archipelago of isolated approaches. The forbidden and isolated island is an archipelago itself, it resists to be conceived as a single unit. The Built Event works are purposefully exercises of conceptual dispersal, while their target appeared to be a blown-up concretization. The very act of focusing creates an intended dispersal of meaning.

A ‘built event’ repeats a specific procedure; it follows a pseudo-methodology. A ‘built event’ work consists of the following steps:
1. Selection of a place
2. Naming of the work
3. Invitation of people - selection of working team
4. Call for works that define the selected place through construction
5. In situ visits
6. In situ workshop
7. Collection of the visits’ and workshop’s traces
8. Construction of the traces book.

Its series of works ends up with a real result formed as an open bounded book. The book is bound with screws; it can be opened, be recharged and re-bound. The works’ deployment consists in the collection of the pages that form this book. The collection of pages is done through a process of direction that involves a place and a group of people. The theatrical act in ‘built event’ works was a work by itself. This ‘built event’ theatrical experience constituted an approach to a place-under-construction.


[ Aristide Antonas ]