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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06.
Man Falling (2022),Abdullah Alamoudi
Spatial and film installation (00:08:24)
Find Me Through the Fog 2, Riyadh
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Artwork produced in collaboration with Abdullah Alamoudi and THIRD SPACE* Studio. Shown in Athr Gallery.
Behind the scenes images taken from the ‘Man Falling’ artwork.
‘Man Falling’ is a rumination on the liability and movement of Man through the greatest and most-pressing “hyperobjects” (Morton, 2014) of our paradigm. It explores the human position in ethnographic and ecological transformation, through the use of liminality and inanimation of human form. The characters, deliberately representations of the “uncanniness” (Morton, 2010) Timothy Morton speaks of in ‘The Ecological Thought’, unsettle our existing relationships to regional national and global positions on ecology and capitalism. The work introduces the ‘liminal’ to the ‘living room’, as a langauge to talk of the strangeness of the non-human in global hegemony - and the human acceptance of this hegemony. It uses cultural and geographic representations of Abha as its methods of articulating this.
Scene from Man Falling film.
The installation questions existing models of modernity and their local and ecological legacies as continuations of humancentrism and terraforming. Through its exploration of the uncanny relationality between Man, ecology, and local ethnography, the work develops post-Kantian theory to relay the various human intersections that are integral to understanding the ecological disasters in Abha. The piece captures this through the collective voyeurism involved in the presentday relationships between ecological decline and modernity. It urges a realisation of the “asymmetry” (Morton, 2014) in the power relations between the human and non-human. Its subjects explore the “restlessly curious search for novelty and distraction” (Bilbro, 2012), amidst an age of “Hypernormalisation” (Curtis, 2016) - exploring Heidegger’s argument of human-ignorance. Thus, ‘Man Falling’ revealsthe individual and collective incapcacity that occurs around dialogues of modernity, through a study of the anthropological and ecological fabric of Abha, its culture and its people.
Stills taken from ‘Man Falling’ film.
