Alexa’s spatial practice moves around concepts of heritage and memory of absent bodies, human or more-than-human, and the role of ruins and monuments in contemporary society. During her architecture studies, she formulated a critical fascination for the underlying protocols of space creation. Through the interrogations of places and processes of knowledge production and storage, she designs opaque environments that hope to not only exist as an infrastructure for conversations to take place, but to actively take part in the dialogues that inhabit them.
Alexa Szekeres
The Project interrogates sonic and material textures in their ability to craft spaces that are outside of the control of the authorities. By thinking through concepts of nomad identity and memory of soundscapes, the project tries to imagine a possible spatiality of the contact zone, a space where the brief relation between the minority and majority population is expanded, made complex, rather than resolved. (see Homi Bahbah)
By understanding and reperforming soundscapes, and their interactions with the materiality of the built environment, the work tries to imagine, through a practice of worlding, environments that exist in the negative space of the city.
still from film
Architecture has been forcefully employed by the majority population to minimize and control contact. Despite this, I hold memories of contact scattered everywhere around the city.
Navigating the space of my home town through memories, I remember sounds permeating architectures, private and public as if two modes of space production would be at play at all times. One rigid, one fluid. One existing in space and the other in time.
The Roma seem to craft space through control over frequencies. Thus, in the words of Julian Henrique, generating a space that is not under the control of the authorities. A space outside of space. A negative space. Temporary space. Space born at contact, from contact.
still from film
still from film
still from film
Frequencies passed through, and textures walked with, invite new understandings of territoriality.
Soundscapes cannot be understood separate from their materiality. With their Absorptive and reflective properties, textiles and metals actively participate in the practice of crafting place. And when materials come in contact with one another, when tools hit metal, when feet stomp soil, rhythmic physical textures keep the memory of the sonic space of this contact.
Textures, both sonic and physical, become vehicles that help navigate the complex landscape of the contact zone, at the same time destabilizing the tropes and aesthetics that surround the fictionalization of the Roma peoples.
view of installation pre-performance
view of installation during the performance
"moving with fragile paths kept secret"
"moving with the treasure"
In order to imagine the physicality of the contact zone, textures are reperformed, stretched over imagined terrain, to be explored in an exercise in wording, Of a world that exists in the negative space of the city. As such, this third space cannot exist territorially. Here, the brief relation between the two characters is expanded, made complex, rather than resolved. And in its imagined physicality, it wishes to renegotiate the denied spaces of contact.
Inside the third space, poems exist alongside spatial performances of textures, both sonic and visual. Here, language becomes interchangeable with noise, while the narrative carries through into the material.
still from digital performance of the poems: the tool/ the body/ the jewel
still from digital performance of the poem: visible-invisible