Manus Occulata, Andrea Alciato (1546) Emblematum libellus
Call for Papers
Interstices Under Construction Symposium: The Traction of Drawing
Auckland 14-15 November 2009
Keynote speaker: Prof Marco Frascari, Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism
Carleton University, Ottawa
Why raise the issue of drawing again? With the proliferation and maturation of digital technologies, what
is the use of the hand and the traces it makes on clay, stone, wood or paper? This symposium seeks to examine the technologies of drawing – their marks, lines, scratches, furrows, incisions, touches, dots and
dashes, inscriptions, string lines, stains and blotches; pencilled, inked, chalked, brushed, illuminated or
erased on diverse grounds.
What is made in the acts of drawing comes into being through the sapience of a facture, not through any
Cartesian process of mathème. Conceived thus, drawing is wholly based on an intimate knowledge of material manifestations, within which tangible lines become carriers of fluid and invisible links that guide
intangible thought.
Pulling in pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology,
and philology from alien territories, one should write and draw with hesitation, discovering the multiple
aspects of graphesis , a generative graphic process understood in its slow making. The fruitful vagueness
of graphesis comes from the ambiguity embodied in the Latin spell: nullo dies sine linea, where linea (line), a
heuristic device, must be understood as a line of writing, as a line in a drawing, or as the pulling of a line
on a construction site. Architecture results from their miscegenation: images are written and words are
drafted; cultural events and material expressions cross. Graphesis is a course of actions, the factures which
actualize future and past.
The quality and selection of the ink’s luminosity, graphite’s fatness, watercolour’s lightness, tempera’s
density, the screen’s pixellation, the flexibility or rigidity of supports … readers of the draw ings indirectly see and savour them all. They foster “inferences from facture”, an extremely productive procedure.1 To consider an artefact in terms of its facture is to consider it as a record of its own having been
made. Drawings’ signifying power is in the liturgy of their making, which generates an aura that can be
intuited by maker and reader simply by casting a glance.
1
David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, London, Phaidon. 2003. Facture is the Latin past participle of facio, facere ,
meaning both to make and to do: “fact” and “facture ” are closely related.
El Lissitzky, The Constructor, Self-Portrait (c.1925)
Drawing as tool, technique and technology exteriorises the mind and emotions; it makes present the invisible. Drawing as a forecasting, predictive medium aims at a destination; it has a scope and end, it designates. Projecting, throwing forward orthogonal or oblique lines, it can sever, as in sections and plans. In
draughting, as an act of thought, drawing seeks enactment: the making of lines which instruct further
making in implementation. Or it translates: from drawing to building and building to drawing. In
sketches, outlines, and studies we may pursue an allusive idea through the traction of lines. The formative force of an idea, emanating from the body as from the mind, seeks ever greater precision, often in
successive drafts or erasures. Conversely, gestures, traces or tracks of the line can be eventful, punctuate
flows like notation in music, or regulate flows like a programme or grammé.
Such are the issues this symposium seeks to examine and to which we invite you to contribute.
The symposium will be held on 14-15 November 2009 at the Design Theatre, School of Architecture and
Planning, The University of Auckland, 22 Symonds St, Auckland.
We welcome postgraduate students, academics and practitioners to present their investigations in 20
minute papers. Please send a 500 word abstract of your presentation to Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul
([email protected]) by 24 July 2009. Abstracts will be double-blind refereed and, if accepted, published on the Interstices website (www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz).
Those who present at the symposium will be invited to submit their reworked papers for double-blind
refereeing, to be published in Interstices 11: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts 2 in 2010.
We look forward to your contribution!
2 Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts received an A in the Australian Research Council’s Journal Ranking Exercise 2009.