Notes on movement: Performative Drawing
Making Space  I  1After320, Delhi
2016

During the three-month engagement with the site, the architectural space was approached not merely as a location for display, but as a generator of new ways of thinking, making and interacting. There has always existed a conventional knowledge, a subconsciously guided way of navigating and moving from point A to B within these architectural spaces. Wherein, the architecture inherently guides the temporal body through prescribed paths and habitual modes of movement, shaping up how one instinctively navigates. This predetermined relationship between body and space fascinated me, since I was struggling to create those in-between spaces for others to experience what I had been experiencing myself, i.e. the simultaneous creation and erasure of forms. Seeking to momentarily disrupt these embedded patterns and open up alternative modes of spatial experience, it became a point of departure for the work and eventually led to a performance-based drawing in the series Notes on Movement, titled Notes on Movement- Performative Drawing.

Executed within the three-dimensional space constructed at 1After320, ‘Notes on Movement’ emerged from an enquiry into the transient forms that continually emerge and disappear within the mind of viewers. Built upon a concealed set of precise set of instructions,

alternating between clockwise and counter-clockwise movements, the work unfolded as a live drawing enacted through the movement of a body within space. Geometric forms were continuously created and erased through the performance itself. The viewer, while watching the performance, could see it becoming and being erased at the same time, as there are no traces of the form left. Every action originated from and returned to the same point, forming a cyclical structure in which the drawing ephemerally existed only for the duration of the said performance and ultimately survived exclusively in the viewer’s memory. Expanding beyond a static mark, the in-flux bodily intervention transformed the drawing into a temporal and embodied experience. And thereby, proposed space itself as a dynamic material, medium and active generator of form.

Link to the project https://parulguptastudio.com/work/project-making-space/