Lines in Exile
Toward a Phenomenology of Situated Mark Making
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48619/bbds.v7i1.A1425Keywords:
Drawing, architecture, Arts Based Research, expanded drawing, Visual essay, phenomenology, Social Art, Public Art, Civic Art, Urban Interventions, Infrastructure, Basic Services, Sanitation, India, Upcycling,, installationAbstract
This submission forms part of an ongoing inquiry in my interdisciplinary practice focused on developing an approach toward a phenomenology of aesthetic mark making. Rather than treating the line as a mimetic or purely graphic device, this research approaches it as the visible residue of negotiation between material, transcendental, and social conditions.
The proposed contribution takes the form of a hybrid visual essay and project report. It reflects on earlier site responsive installations (https://amirrhariri.com/section/447282-Installation.html) in which drawing is embedded within provisional architectonic structures and introduces a series of related project proposals currently under development. In these environments, wall drawings, suspended surfaces, and fragments of structural frames create spaces in which, through a haptic encounter, viewers engage with unstable and partially constructed environments referencing displacement and exile.
Within this framework, the line operates less as representation than as an index of spatial negotiation. Marks accumulate across surfaces, responding to material resistance of collapse and the physical constraints of temporary structures. Drawing thus emerges through interaction between bodily gesture and environmental conditions. The impulse to mark surfaces under constraint has a long history, from inscriptions produced in conditions of confinement such as detention centers and refugee camps to informal markings that record presence, memory, or resistance within restricted spaces.
While grounded in contemporary installation practice, the inquiry situates itself within a longer history of drawing as an embodied and situated act. From prehistoric cave markings and ritual inscription to narrative image-making and philosophical reflections on gesture, the line has often functioned as a trace of presence and movement rather than a neutral graphic element. Reconsidering the line through the lens of situated practice highlights how each mark registers both a moment of contact and a gesture unfolding over time.
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References
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