Blubilds – drawing diagrammatic stains

This project adopts the concept of a dance diagram such as Andy Warhol’s Fox Trot (1962) introduced by Rosalind Krauss in her writing on the relationship of material forces in a diagrammatic structure to create a model of notation with actions and objects derived from Edgelands. Coined by Marion Shoard, Edgelands are post-industrial cityscapes, a typology of abandon, dereliction and decay. Shoard notes these sites are characterized by creative cultural practices of photography and graffiti; urban explorers, parkour. My Blubilds project aimed to challenge these cultural practices of parkour and graffiti to provoke new engagement in those sites. To this end, I apply the concept of Rosalind Krauss’s resistant diagram and gravity I adapted from Formless: A User’s Guide (Bois and Krauss 1997). Gravity is a force of undoing to remake spaces – and I draw with my body and equipment to facilitate gravity within a dance diagram to create a new space. This contrasts the cultural practices such as Graffiti and parkour and breaks with those existing activities to tag, mark and leave a new trace in Edgelands. Blubilds draw a live embodied diagram, based on the movement patterns found in Edgeland sites, since ‘action’ is to draw a line with the body. Tim Ingold’s approach to drawing informs my perspective that lines of movement that draw (in) place engage with the lived narratives of those places. Ingold suggests that the narratives that make place are created by entangled lines created by movement; furthermore, to ‘draw out’ – as in Douglas Rosenberg’s (2012) phrase – suggests that drawing in place ‘draws-out’ new spaces. Blue is emblematic as a nod to Krauss’s ‘rude noise, the blueprint and the acts of Graffiti’, it becomes Blubilds – a dynamic diagrammatic stain.