less dramatic and rather mundane survival, but nonetheless is an action, taken against politicising the space, by the people as a collective, rather than as individuals. Actions, through mundane daily objects (monobloc chairs and carpets), occupy spaces, externalise power, and manifest ideological stances. Henri Lefebvre wrote of the production of space vis-à-vis the rule of the city: the production of urban spaces is not natural but is a result of a carefully mediated economic, sociocultural and political process. His description is almost an exact depiction of the complex material choreography characteristic of the Cave: ‘From the start of an activity so oriented towards an objective, spatial elements—the body, limbs, eyes—are mobilised, including both materials (stone, wood, bone, leather, etc.) and matériel (tools, arms, language, instructions and agendas). Relations based on an order to be followed—that is to say, on simultaneity and synchronicity — are thus set up, by means of intellectual activity, between the component elements of the action undertaken on the physical plane. All productive activity is defined less by invariable or constant factors than by the incessant to-and-fro between temporality (succession, concatenation) and spatiality (simultaneity, synchronicity).’ 10 This complex material and spatial choreography elevates these mere objects, through the myriad actions undertaken by the persons at the cave, into a social space in all its intricacies. What the case of the Cave of the Patriarchs reveals, therefore, is a reversal of the conventional relationship between design professionals and end users, who take on the active role of design partners. These theories could be illustrated further in other sacred sites where the functional use of monobloc chairs, and hence the interpretation of object-space relations, is mutable. While at the Temple Mount/Al-Haram al-Sharif/Al-Aqsa the simple action of defining a space serves as a political and ideological notion of propriety, in the Western Wall Plaza the potential in a pile of mundane monobloc chairs (images on the facing page) can alter the very definition of a public space at any given moment: from a prayer area and a place of devotion to the venue of a civil event, and vice versa . As per Certeau’s description of the daily acts of mutiny against the control of the urban space over the individual, it is the believers who struggle to define their own spatial identities. Through the use and placement of objects, such as the mundane and transparent monobloc chairs or the more identified prayer carpets, they occupy and maintain a temporal delineated space. The major act of innovation in this case is derived not from the minds of design professionals but rather from the daily use of transparent or ordinary objects by end users. Apart from their semiotic attributes, daily objects are used to delineate boundaries. A towel used at the beach to define a boundary
will signal other people that this place is taken. Mundane objects define boundaries and social groups at the Cave of the Patriarchs in a similar yet much more complex fashion. Mundane (transparent) objects serve in this situation a dual purpose: first, to define and maintain fluid enclaves, shifting hands between the two groups of believers, and second, to occupy temporal territories buffered by material objects. Interestingly the military, police and other government officials serve as mediators, creating and maintaining this complex choreography of objects. While relations between space and objects can be found in every interaction of daily life, the Cave of the Patriarchs presents an intricate and complex state of affairs. Policy makers and government officials created a situation in which an ever-explosive reality must be governed by a detailed accounting of daily behaviours; at the same time the people of the cave create and maintain their own realities. As soldiers and police officers maintain the law, within these strict regulations the choreography of material reality allows the believers an amount of freedom. The rearrangement of mundane objects therefore serves not only to take a stand against Israeli lawmakers but also to take an actual stand while claiming dominion within a contested site. Examining the actions of end users engaging with designed objects in contested sites such as the Cave of the Patriarchs illuminates the complex transformation of a space into a place, or of a ‘non-place’ to a place, to use Marc Augé’s term. 11 For Augé people spend their days travelling between liminal, transitional places. Narrative places or places where the production of space by end users, who assume the sociocultural agency of the designer as material philosopher, can lead to urban political change, minor as it might be at first: ‘Who will be tomorrow’s resisters? All of those who, renouncing neither past history nor history to come, will denounce the ideology of the present in which the image can be a powerful point of relay. All of those creators who, somehow or other preserving the circulation between the individual imagination, the collective imagination and fiction, will not give up incurring the miracle of the encounter. All the dreamers, finally, who are skilful enough to cultivate their own phantasies so that the off-the- shelf imagination of the illusionists of the all-fictional becomes an object of private derision.’ 12
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10 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. p 71 11 Marc Augé, M. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity , trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 2008 12 Marc Augé, The War of Dreams: Exercises in Ethno-Fiction , trans. Liz Heron. London: Pluto, 1999. p 120
A version of this essay by Jonathon Ventura first appeared as ‘Just a Monobloc Chair? The Political Potential of Everyday Objects’ in Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation , editors: Ifat Finkelman, Deborah Pinto Fdeda, Oren Sagiv, Tania Coen-Uzzielli. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2018
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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