Poetics of Space

Based on the like-titled seminal text by Gaston Bachelard, this work constitutes a study of the subjective perception of space. It focuses on the “poetic image” as an immediate environmental perception that precedes conscious thought, imbuing it with properties beyond function and form and affording the observer a state of daydreaming. The dancetheatre piece explores the concept of intimacy, revealing imagery that is not descriptive, but rather points to a personal, subjective, sense of space, thus adapting one of the most important philosophical tendencies of the 20th century and a fundamental influence to contemporary architecture.

Bachelard’s book focuses on the house, shelter spaces like the nest, spatial features like corners and roundness; so can pockets be thought of as mental and conceptual spaces that can create powerful, timeless imagery that is rooted in the collective unconscious. One can imagine a pocket as a delineation of a personal (or, rather, intersubjective) value system that needs protecting from the outside world, a construct for safekeeping, as in Bachelard’s drawers and closets, or even a compartment defined by abstract properties that carry with them resonances with the past, present, or future.

It is the resulting mental imagery, in particular, that is of interest; the flooding of past experiences that are not memories but something different that stems from the concepts we have associated with the respective spaces, possibly from childhood. In the author’s own words. “we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost”.

Poetics of Space by Die Wolke art group [GR]