Abstract:
This research project proposes a reconfiguration of urban bodies
organized around the notion of the ‘aberrant joint’. Etymologically
tied to the articulation of bodily parts, the idea of ‘jointing’ is used
in the project to test a condition of ‘aberration’ in the normative
operations reproducing and consolidating corporate capitalism and its
retail correlate, big-box retail. Initially imagined as an investigation
of the creative possibilities, disjunction in urban place relations that
might potentiate. The consequences and implications emerging with
the COVID-19 lockdowns across Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland early in
the research offered a strikingly significant instance of disjunction. As
such, the 2020’s pandemic, with its unprecedented social, economic and
urban disruption reshaped how we might think about public spaces,
their senses of belonging and their manner of binding dwelling places,
neighbourhoods, cities and nations as a whole.
If in the early adjustment phase of the pandemic, the overarching and
disconcerting question facing people could be summarised as ‘what
next?’, emerging in the almost unimaginable disjunctions set in play
by social distancing and lockdowns was a quest to measure up to or
become equal to that disruption in reforming senses. Hence, from within
the unthinkable, a counter-question arose: ‘what if?’ It is this question,
registering fully as a challenge to the collective imagination, that has
driven the trajectory of this research.
Given the at-home nature of much of collective life during this
research, Gaston Bachelard’s notion of topophilia or dreaming well
domestically has assumed new significance. As such, this project has
pursued what is titled an oneiric-topia, a dream-place adequate to the
rupture and the conjectured promise of a post-pandemic resumption.
While deviation from ‘normal’ ways of living has been the signature
of Covid 19, paralleling the severe stressing of the monetary economy,
were alternative, compensatory exchanges and modes of interaction.
Interaction centred on gifting and playful generosity. In turn, what can
be considered a carnivalesque reimagining of public space is pursued at
the Highland Park Town Centre in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Key in
this reimagining is an ‘un-boxing’ of retail experience and its capture of
curiosity, a design engagement that intends a general critique of ‘big box’
retail systems and their control and trade in data collection