“Borough Market Polyphony” is a work in progress done as part of “The Creative Thesis” workshop at UCL run by the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Slade School of Fine Arts. The goal of the exercise is to create an object that addresses the relationship between practice and theory within a PhD research project.
My project for the workshop uses assemblage as a an argumentative structure to embody both a research/work methodology and a mode of representation. The work takes Borough Market of London’s Bankside (SE1) as a case study and draws on its spatial qualities to inform the final assemblage -a commentary on heterogeneous and multi-voiced publics.
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My first reaction to Borough Market touches on a personal and passionate interest in a certain type of fragmented architectural form. The architectural space of the Market is recognised as an embodiment of the ecstatic in Piranesi’s prison etchings (as discussed by Eisenstein) as well as a reminder of the spatial heterogeneity of the Mezquita at Córdoba.
Polyphony, a concept introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin in reading the multiplicity of voices within Dostoevsky’s narrative structure, is introduced as the theoretical reading intertwined with the “reading” of the site. Polyphony not only refers to the different voices making up a dialogue between individuals, but also to the internal dialogue (agreement and contradiction) that is present within every individual. For Bakhtin, the fundamental aspect of humanity is its profound dialogic nature.
The ecstatic flight of Piranesi’s etchings and the heterogeneous space of the Mezquita are, to my mind, both relatives of polyphony. These phenomena are perceived not as evolutionary processes, but as an immediate juxtaposition of distinct but interdependent elements present within a whole.
The multiple voices at Borough Market are taken first as fragments of the entire dialogue involving the site, and second as the analogous “voices” of the architectural fragments. The dialogue of the site is read and extracted from the local and national press, web sites, official planning documents, public inquiries documents, etc. (Performing live interviews with officials, residents, vendors, “stakeholders”, at the market should eventually be brought into the project.)
The collected fragments are analyzed to see what emerging patterns are present within the whole. The fragments are then rearranged according to the thematic sets. For example, a few recurring themes from the Market dialogue are gentrification, commerce, events, neighbourhood, heritage, planning and inquiry. This last theme refers to the long and ongoing debate on the construction of the Thameslink railway viaduct over the Market. The project was first made public in the late 1980s. In order to focus the research within a specific (recent) time period, the starting point of the discussion is November 25, 1992, when a train collision occurred on the rail tracks above the Market.
Once the larger Market dialogue has been set up it is punctuated with a similar collection of fragments that have been extracted from the theoretical texts. Also organized according to certain themes, these fragments are brought in without a predetermined correlation to the first dialogue. The aim is to allow for the whole argument to emerge from the unforeseen (and yes, some foreseen) relations that are created by the juxtaposition. This moment is, to paraphrase Eisenstein, the explosion of the argument into ecstatic flight.
But there is neither a claim of complete indeterminacy nor randomness in the work. The assemblage is fine-tuned according to relations that were evident from the start and new relations that were created at the moment of juxtaposition. So far, the voice of the author has been present only in establishing a thematic framework for the fragments. This position is concordant with Bakhtin’s perception of the author’s position in the polyphonic novel; the author is not omniscient in relation to his heroes and allows them to dialogically interact (with each other as well as with the equal voice of the author) with relative freedom from his authority.
Visual material is collected in two forms, first, pictures that accompany the published fragments of dialogue, and second, authored photographs of the Market that are as removed as possible from dialectical images. These “field” photographs (Andrea Gursky’s work is a good example) are meant as the space within which the dialogue of the assemblage occurs. There is yet no provision for the first type of picture in the assemblage.
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The project is ongoing but here is a rough sample of the work. (updated 10 May 2009) Photographs of Borough Market including the ones used in the project were posted separately.
