SENSIBILITY AND VIOLENCE

Art and nature denotes in a conventional sense opposite sides of a spectrum where human action and intended creation separates the former from the latter. The work and teaching of Maria Blaisse form a playful vacillation between the two.

In the workshop, Listening to Form, which Maria conducted with members of the First Year Group in the Architecture Class of the Städelschule in November 2006, this playfulness was acted out on collected natural objects: leaves, stalks, branches, moss and similar gathered items. A strange surgical theatre unfolded over the next few days.

Demanding the utmost concentration and focus from her group, Maria and her adopted co-workers set out to explore and discover latent forms in the natural collectibles at hand. Exercising skills, including cutting, ripping, tearing and folding, the group transformed the stock from nature into strange and utterly beautiful objects. The process was akin to an eccentric form of inverse engineering, where surfaces and forms where recovered and finished as manipulated and deviant ‘natural’ forms. Of course, there was nothing natural about them, not after the cutting, ripping and tearing – all in all, rather violent incursions on the found objects. But herein was also to be found the beauty of it; the process at once marred and salvaged the original, perfect forms. It did so through a careful and meditated response to these given forms.

The title of the workshop, Listening to Form, at once captures the two crucial aspects to that which unfolded during Maria’s visit. First, listening is set in time. In other words, the work that took place unfolded from a delicate and selective response to natural forms and their given conditions, through various modes of operating on the same forms in time, to the rebuilding of new artefacts. Second, the intensity of the process, where Maria insisted on the strength of emotions and a focused exercise of creative skills and imagination, embodied the full intercourse of the basic or inherent temporal features of the objects at hand and planned action on these. Perhaps it was about discovering, and perhaps it was about locating one’s own impulses in relation to the found objects?

In the end, Listening to Form was presented in a small review session and it was the strangest review thus far had in the Architecture Class. Normally, these sessions are comprised of slide shows accompanied by the students endlessly explaining what they have done, attempting to rationalize ideas, sensibilities, motivations and operations. Maria’s workshop was finalized and completed in silence. Stunningly beautiful images passed across the screen. And nobody said a word. It was as if her companions were still listening to the objects and the visual results of their executed plans. And, if they were, they were now listening more to themselves than to the natural starting points. All the guests were simply taking pleasure in the beauty of it all while trying to come to terms with the nature of human action exerted perfectly on found natural forms. It was a hushed divulgence of the nature of design.

Johan Bettum

Staedelschule 26 jan 2007