Projected Architectures

A Review of Surface of the World: Architecture and the Moving Image

Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila

6 June to 27September 2014.
In the last century, film and architecture have played out a relationship
forged in space, and thus may be cast as spatial, one that mutually informs
and interpenetrates. Architectural and cinematic practice thrives on the
apprehension of space, taking on the flesh of time and inhabiting a life of
movement. A film without architecture is unthinkable. Architecture gives film
its semblance of dimensions; setting the mood, character, time, and place
for the action. Film offers a representation of movement through space in
real time, approximating the architectural experience of the moving subject
in an immersive milieu. Like film, architecture has the potential to create,
stage, or frame events so they assume discursive density and signification.
The most interesting contribution of cinema to architecture is how film
creates a distinct synthetic space, through the accretion of fragmentary
images over time through montage and how sequences of spatial
occurrences develop into a narrative and critical discourse employing spatial
categories of analysis topographies, sites, settings and locations. The
exhibition The Surface of the World: Architecture and the Moving Image,
presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design of the De La Salle
College of Saint Benilde in Manila, investigates the relationship between the
built environment and the moving image via a range of filmographic
practices: video works, installations, shorts and full-length films produced in
the last four decades by an array of international artist and filmmakers:
Cocoy Lumbao (Philippines), John Smith (United Kingdom), Saskia Olde
Wolbers (Netherlands), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Zbigniew
Rybcznski (Poland), John Gerrard (Ireland), Jozef Robwski (Poland), Julian
Rosefeldt (Germany), Tacita Dean (United Kingdom), Dionisio Gonzalez
(Spain), Elizabeth Price (United Kingdom), Isaac Julien (United Kingdom). Its
curator Clare Carolin (former curator at the ModernArt Oxford, the National
Touring Exhibitions, and Hayward Gallery, London) assembled the work in
this exhibition based on their intense concentration on the appearance of
the built environment and the rejection, or in some cases, subversion, of
explanatory narrative.
The gallery space recreates the dimly lit environment of cinema house that
have been compartmentalized into acoustically-isolated spaces of
spectatorship to independently showcase the architectural films in a range of
formats and modes of presentations from 16 mm film installations to time-

lapse composites, from dual-channel film projections to computer generated

simulations. In this darkened space, the audience is drawn to the allure of
projected light and shadow onto the fourth wall a pictorial field between
reality and fiction -- as it weaves the magic of vicarious experience. Akin to a
series of episodic spatial plots that are unreeled inside the sanctum of the
gallery space through a progression of viewing compartments where the
audience are allowed to freely navigate and create their own sequences of
exploration, thus privileging plural narratives and multiplicity of signification.
Taken as whole, these films articulate the spatial and visual experiences of
20th century urbanism through leitmotif of modernity: urban dystopia and
marginality; the urban experiences of hope and loss, yearning and nostalgia,
terror and fear, crime and violence; the mapping of identity and difference;
and, the spectacles of contemporary consumption.
The changing notions of time and space are portrayed through the conflation
of architectural and filmic device. The new conception of time and space
mediated through the critical lens of cinema as manifested in the
accompanying films in this exhibition produce an entirely new experience
and vision of the contemporary metropolis. Moving images evoke this
experience of urban modernity that is disenchanting and fleeting, generating
rapid stimuli for further change. The speed and shock-like experience of
modernity is the decisive element that has influenced the works in this
exhibition, inevitably soliciting from its audience intellectual inquiry and
critical reflections about urban/rural distinction, urban destruction and
reconstruction, urban neurosis and paranoia, housing crises, industrialization,
symbolic space, spatial nostalgia, virtual/alternative reality, and the politics
of architectural styles and urban planning.