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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05.
Help! I’m Trapped Inside of a Tiffin: on the immediate and the material in articulating diaspora (2023), Mohsin Ali
Manchester School of Architecture
United Kingdom
Research paper written as a contribution to PLATFORM Space + directed by Prof. Swati Chattopadhyay.
This essay explores how architectural languages can be used as a proxy for realising an otherwise spectral reality of the diasporic migrant. By posing architecture as a process of material relations, architecture opens up countless potentials in materialising what is otherwise an immaterial liminality and intangibility. The experience of diaspora, and the knowledge surrounding it, becomes real, dimensional and fathomable against the traditional store of post-colonial discourses.
By a collaborative ethnography, this research sees the intricacy of familial globality, made accessible through the optimisation of physical artefacts, and through the physical production and hand-drawing of a children’s book. Architectural methods and spatial co-ordination are explored as a practice in recognising and consolidating planetary complexities; posed as an agent in a practice of imminence. It is this immediacy that “Help! I’m Trapped Inside of a Tiffin” argues is a vehicle for translation, in both ethnographic and institutional knowledge, to offer entirely new representations of information. These methodological appropriations see the production of new types of knowledge-store as propositions for a more accessible and democratised understanding of global entanglements.
