Adjective Constructions

Stratigraphic Drawing and Projective Dis/placement

Abstract

Adjective Constructions is an ongoing speculative drawing practice tended to by MOTE Projects (Chad Connery and Anca Matyiku). Through it we leverage our fifteen years of collaboration across the continent, to examine the opportunities in drawing together remotely. We each draw from a physical site that is ultimately inaccessible to the other to create a stratified soil from which to grow the drawings. The drawings emerge from a bi-directional process of site documentation, fragmentation, mediated transmissions, compression, delamination, and unstable construction, producing twin-faced drawings from a pairing of two local sites that are never simultaneously accessible to both collaborators. While we’ve elsewhere explored the dialogic process of drawing together remotely, we take this opportunity to examine more closely the drawings as stratified artifacts. 

We understand Adjective Constructions as neither maps, nor models, nor paintings but consider them informed by aspects of all three, each expanding the toolset for thinking through place as well as through mediated distance. The kinds of knowledge they may produce is thus situated in the artifacts’ resistance to familiar categories. They are essentially sedimentary constructions: layered, compressed, and plastic image-objects whose depth remains active and consequential. The strata of the drawings are legible but never complete, propagating spatial projections of variable reliability drawn from mediated experiences. Their surfaces are not lines on a plane but laminated fields, occupiable and reorderable such that their thickness is imbued with dormant potentiality and remains partially in play.

In responding to the call for cartographies of practice, this hybrid format presentation contends with the notion that the mapping actions of Adjective Constructions are not planimetric, but firmly sectional. The thickness of these drawings, their stratigraphy of material and procedure, refuses definition and keeps meaning persistently unsettled. Through these processes of stratification that involve two distant drawing partners, memory and experience are simultaneously situated and displaced, registered and translated through both presence and absence in place. Thus, the drawings chart out a projective and generative space of in-betweenness that is tethered to two distinct locations as well as the distance between them. Through this hybrid format conversation - somewhere between visual essay and close reading of the drawings themselves - we explore the types of knowledge that emerge in engendering this projective geography through our architects’ tools contaminated by mediated distance.