‘It would be interesting to think about objects where you cannot really distinguish the object from the support, in any sense.We want the object to be independent and freestanding, but it never is.There are either logical or real conditions, or constructed ones.’ — Mark Cousins in an interview with Celine Condorelli 1
This project is a rethink of what a park in the city can be. One strand of this investigation is the nature of the object and how it is framed, and whether one can deliberately misread the immanent greenery of Rotterdam as series of framed ‘objects’. Another strand notes how these elements of greenery are already framed within the city. In this double investigation, I seek not so much to comprehensively link these factors, but to borrow and ‘misread’ theories of landscape and urbanism to arrive at a certain rethinking of conventions, allowing gaps in which fieldwork can take place as a way of thinking through doing. In their work on support structures, Condorelli and Cousins use Derrida’s concept of the frame to reposition what is typically read as a stand-alone object but which usually requires an often concealed support in order to exist. Derrida’s concept of the frame, which he expands from Kant’s frame as supplement to the work (in the case of a painting, for example), concerns the paradox of it neither belonging to the work of art nor to its context: ‘The frame is never a ground in the way the context or the work may be, but neither does its marginal thickness form a figure. At least, it is a figure which arises of its own accord.’ 2 What happens if we apply Derrida’s elaboration to Kant’s idea of the object? Kant considers the concept of the object as a constitution of things that have a finality as such. 3 If we consider the object with its frame as its own figure, this combined entity no longer has that finality - yet the object, because of its frame, can still be recognised as something distinguished from its context. What this suggests is that each thing framed is in turn a frame, and, at another scale, in turn frames. Rotterdam, like many other cities, is patchwork of sharply defined elements of the green and the built. It is not so much that the built fabric frames green voids in the form of parks within it, but rather that it is a web of green that frames the city blocks. This green web is made by parks, grassy tramways, singels, tree-lined streets, however only some of these green fragments are defined and recognised as parks. In a city with so much public open green space distributed so extensively, how is it possible to determine what is a park? 1 Cousins, Mark. ‘Support Structures: An Interview with Mark Cousins’ Interview by Celine Condorelli. Afterall, Summer 2009: 118-123. 2 Derrida, Jacques, and Craig Owens. ‘The Parergon’ October Vol 9.Summer (1979): 3-41. The MIT Press. p26 3 Kant, Immanuel, and Arnulf Zweig. ‘The Critique of Judgement’ in The essential Kant . New York: New American Library, 1970. p 397
Designated parks have designated paths, but so do certain streets. Official parks are framed, and thus understood, through a system of indicators: signs and entrances, delineated areas on maps. If this system is suspended and only the idea of the park as a framed fragment of nature is used, then each small leaf and each patch of lawn, each singel and each open lot, can be read as a ‘park’. How does our understanding of the city as an entity change? This photographic project began with walking through Rotterdam in a dérive from instance of greenery to instance of greenery, making an inventory of greenery at all scales: a planted traffic island is framed by the road but the grass that covers most of it also frames the flowerbeds. The curb that frames the traffic island frames the mosses that grow in its cracks. Every instance of something framed in turn frames something else – the process repeats at every scale. A frame is not necessarily the edge between the context and the thing, but rather the limits of perception, between the smallest plant that the camera can focus on, to the largest playing field that that fits in the camera’s frame. Rather than plotting this photographic accumulation of frames and the plant world in plan as a conventional map, it is plotted spatially, as a series of conditions introducing into the system of ‘park’ signifiers (the signs and the fences) a more general condition of frames, whereby any little plant can be articulated. The city becomes a system of frames. The possibilities of ‘maps’ unconstrained by geographic relationships and proximities in favour of recognisable spatial conditions refocusses on the small event, the thin edges, the often overlooked, and destabilises differentiations between city and landscape. If every instance of greenery is understood to be not on its own but as part of a system of framed frames, then each such instance can only be identified as a temporary ‘final’ object. Although the city can be read a park, the very identity of park is destabilised, allowing for the ongoing possibility that new configurations of greenery can be set aside in the urban fabric. c
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