Fragmentation and Intimate Space in Olivier Ratsi's Anarchitecture Photography

Abstract

French multimedia artist Olivier Ratsi evokes doubt in the mind of the viewer by initiating an inquiry into representations of abnormal architecture. Concrete structures become mirages, reminders of temporality. The fragmented images are reflections on the fragility of appearance, anticipating interpretation and revealing the artifice of meaning. Tire surrealistic forms in Ratsi's photography are in dialogue with many innovative architectural theorists and practitioners who have been exploring the abstraction of form over the past forty years, most specifically borrowing the term anarchitecture introduced by New York avant-garde artist Gordon Matta-Clark in the 1970s. (1) Ratsi represents a contemporary inclination toward the phenomenological within architecture, employing an aesthetic that rejects archetypal geometry and returns instead to the materialization of individual experience in urban space. One can reject all history and yet accept the world of the sea and the stars. The rebels who wish to ignore nature and beauty are condemned to banish from history everything with which they want to construct the dignity of existence and of labor. Every great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and Tolstoy knew how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart. --Albert Camus, The Rebel The reconciliatory mission of the architect is poetic. This is necessarily an individual task, encompassing personal expression and reference to the totality. There is no meaningful logic without acknowledging the intersubjective world, best revealed in dreams and myths. --Alberto Perez-Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science TRACING ANARCHITECTURE: FROM GORDON MATTA-CLARK TO OLIVIER RATSI In all of its innumerable shapes, orchestrated movements, and meanings, the city is a silent oppressor. Obedience is etched into the hand that reaches for a metal handle instead of tracing the most natural trajectory to the glass. Entrances and exits are defined by the metric swaying of doors, the minute gradations between concrete strata distinguishing spaces. Everything that can be sensed has a static order, a clear function. And even the shock that comes from the body touching the unknown is extinguished by the certainty promised by logical corners, purposeful curves and, everywhere, a concrete definition of direction. In cities such as this, there is no discovery, only encounter. Based in Paris, Ratsi experiments with the transformation and subversion of existing architectural spaces through the use of photography, digital installations, audiovisual performance, and generative mapping performance. Ratsi is also known as a co- founder of the European artistic collective AntiVJ, whose light- based installations and projections experiment with abnormal perceptual experience. Individually pursuing some of the themes concurrent to AntiVJ, Ratsi uses the subjects and processes of his own photographic series to isolate the viewer's perceptions of space in an image and, through this disruption, to inquire into the notions of a normalized urban environment. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Based on research begun in 2005, Ratsi's prolific photographic exploration of anarchitecture is part of a larger body of work called WYSI*not*WYG (What You See is Not What You Get, 2009-14), and is his most political endeavor. The series in this collection engage with the deconstruction of objective reality as it is expressed in architecture, and incite the viewer's creative agency through the reconstructive act. In this work, Ratsi's eye rests on the macroscopic elements of the urban environment, the crests and peaks of a cityscape to which the viewer's attention is most often drawn. Monumental skyscrapers and prominent characters of urban infrastructure are distorted through the manipulation of technological error, either spontaneously occurring in Ratsi's photography or intentionally produced, resulting in a disrupted image that seems to shatter, puncture, or misplace parts of the structures. …