THIRD SPACE* Studio
THIRD SPACE* Studio is an art and research-led interdisciplinary architecture practice. We establish our theoretical standpoint amongst our post-modern and post-colonial predecessors, as one of dialogue, mediation and hybridity.
THIRD SPACE* Studio © 2023
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Edges and the In-Between (2022),Mohsin Ali
Film installation (00:12:38)
Sindbad: Land of Fragile Hearts, Jeddah/Manchester
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia/United Kingdom
Artwork produced in collaboration with THIRD SPACE* Studio, for Sindbad 2022.
Stills taken from film installation.
Through a series of collaborative workshops with artists at the Manchester School of Theatre, ‘Edges and the In Between’ stages a dialogue around the nature of subjective and objective reality by using choreography and human form as a visuallanguage in representing its attainment. The artwork uses Homi Bhabha’s seminal essay, ‘The Location of Culture’, to translate the emergence of phenomenon such assplitting, ambivalence, and ‘Third Space’ discourses that take place in the 21st century zeitgeist. The piece ruminates on the negotiation involved in obtaining truth, and the schizophrenia that prevails in mediating cultural binaries and forming new discourses.
Living in large and entangled global systems, our realities are often too complex to comprehend. We daily experience multitudes of possibilities, realities, rights and wrongs. But where do we situate ourselves within them? Can we ethically situate ourselves within this system whilst maintaining an honesty to our reality?
Images taken at rehearsals and collaborative workshops when developing a choreography.
This piece is a rumination on the fundamental human phenomenon of ego “splitting” (Fairbairn, 1994) – a psychological tendency to romanticise, other, and seek comfort at the binaries of our mind. Humans provide ourselves with frameworks to exist in, but this body of work explores the relationship between these self-made frameworks and the complexity of the world around us.
This spatialises the philosophical and psychological nature of these questions. By placing humans within space, the work aims to map the relationship between our comfortable realities, and complex collective human experience. This spatial dialogue is created not just through spaces within a network, but also through human movement between and within these spaces.
Briefing the artists when first starting the collaborative process.
