Doctoral Project
Frictitious Architectures: Translation and Mutability in the Russian Far North

Doctoral Project
Nicholas Stefan Drofiak
Prof. Dr. Philip Ursprung
 

Frictitious Architectures: Translation and Mutability in the Russian Far North

I’m interested in how the ideas in fictive architecture become changed when works are re-told in different forms. That is, in exploring works of art and architecture that act as feral fictions – that provoke engagement with reality by suggesting alternative re-imaginings – and seeing how their concepts mutate or are re-interpreted when translated between visual and language-framed media.

The models through which we frame reality are various and offer differing representations of the world. Different languages grammatically frame event and (cultural) space differently; their lexica are differently specialised and nuanced. No model is singularly valid. Models can be destabilised by the act of translation, in which a seething mass of possible constructions contest the re-representation of an idea in a new form. Equivocal works of architecture, such as Ivan Leonidov's City of the Sun, require engagement and creativity in being reframed and debated; the frictional difficulty of their translation shows reality to be not static or singular but mutable, and hence hegemonic positions are open to be challenged, and the future to be fought for.

In 1931, Ivan Leonidov was sent 2800km northeast of Moscow to assist in designing the new port of Igarka, in the traditional territory of the isolated Ket language. My research cruxes on the experimental collision of Leonidov and Ket: what does it mean to reframe Leonidov's ideas in a culturally distant model of reality? What perspective might this alternative translation reveal; how might it shake our habitual, ossified conceptions? What becomes important, or most salient in an alternative apprehension of Leonidov’s utopia?

I explore issues of translation, media of representation and alternative research methods through the devising and carrying-out of an experiment. Using an installation based on Leonidov's imagery, the imagined city will be described by native Ket-speakers as if appearing in the Igarka landscape, using the language specialised to discussing that landscape. The texts elicited will be linguistically analysed to explore the implications of transplanting a western perspective.

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Dr. Nicholas Stefan Drofiak