Fundamental is a film triptych that investigates the social and environmental urgency around the management of the human body and its by-products. exploring ideas of waste, ecology, communality, social practices, and taboos, together with the architectural systems in which we exist. As such, it offers a critical meditation on the increasing fragility of the human body and an exploration of the architectures and ecosystems of nutrition, care, and waste disposal in the immediate future.
The triptych is framed as a three-step ‘rite of passage'. Each rite has a specific socio-political context and associated architectural system. they consider material transformations, such as the transformation of lard from solid to liquid, food into excrement, or water into bacterial transport. By ritualizing body-focused activities that would otherwise be considered every day, these films question the contextual conditioning of the human biome that in the post-industrial landscape is open for intervention all the way down to the molecular scale.
Awards:
Highly Commended - Architects Journal Student Award 2018
Winner - Head of Architecture Prize. RCA End of Year Show 2018
Nominated - Deans Prize. RCA End of Year Show 2018
Fundamental is a film triptych that investigates the social and environmental urgency around the management of the human body and its by-products. exploring ideas of waste, ecology, communality, social practices, and taboos, together with the architectural systems in which we exist. As such, it offers a critical meditation on the increasing fragility of the human body and an exploration of the architectures and ecosystems of nutrition, care, and waste disposal in the immediate future.
The triptych is framed as a three-step ‘rite of passage'. Each rite has a specific socio-political context and associated architectural system. they consider material transformations, such as the transformation of lard from solid to liquid, food into excrement, or water into bacterial transport. By ritualizing body-focused activities that would otherwise be considered every day, these films question the contextual conditioning of the human biome that in the post-industrial landscape is open for intervention all the way down to the molecular scale.
Awards:
Highly Commended - Architects Journal Student Award 2018
Winner - Head of Architecture Prize. RCA End of Year Show 2018
Nominated - Deans Prize. RCA End of Year Show 2018
FUNDAMENTAL
Short Film Trilogy
2018
RITE I
Duration: 3:32
Aspect Ration: 16:9
In the early days of surgery and before the invention of anesthesia, the anatomical theatre was a testing ground for elaborate experimentation on the human body. it was a spectacle of epic proportions as blood would spill on the white coats and desperate screams would fill the auditorium. the dissection of bodily material was a necessity for acquiring knowledge of the human anatomy and for realizing new and undiscovered truths. a necessity that often came with fatal consequences. the anatomical theatre thereby became an architectural device for generating meaning and the body becomes a sacrificial product of its function. the film investigates this perverse dialectic of the conflict oscillating between discipline and sheer desire, between situation and condition. the rendering process which occurs turns lard waste from solid to semi-liquid - this change in physical state problematizes the use and ultimately the dispossession of such materials.
FUNDAMENTAL
RITE II
Duration: 3:32
Aspect Ration: 16:9
Rite II investigates the increasing stigmatization and taboo of the body’s waste products afforded by the establishment of sewer systems and waste-management procedures. The natural mechanism of defecation has come to find itself in liminal and ambiguous circumstances. As it is the body, but then dislodged from it, into a society that rejects it. In the process of civilizing and purifying cities, excrement has become part of disorder and become shameful. Shit has been assigned to its ‘true’ place, in the home. Making shit no longer visible in the public realm and restructuring the relationship of man's basic excess, as it goes underground. In its wake individualizing behavior and social practices, public space, domestic furnishings, private beds, graves, and hospitals.
RITE III
Duration: 3:32
Aspect Ration: 16:9
Rite III addresses a post-industrial landscape where bodies are open to human intervention all the way down to the molecular scale. Using the idea of stomach fistulation the last film explores new coherences between man and nature. Where the body’s metabolism is shaped through bacterial and nutrition transfusion, making traditional consumption of food redundant. Where our gene expression can be modified with design agents such as crispr. Where we are involuntarily manipulated through the shared bacterial systems that exist in contemporary ecologies as a result of synthetic compounds, such as carbamazepine, that are pissed out to form a new source of pollution inscrutable from water.