About the Work

Architecture, both modern and old, and urban planning played a big role in my family's life growing up. When I later graduated from my BA art studies in London, and what was then called Conceptual Studies, I included my childhood home in my graduation thesis, which consisted of an exhibition and a written dissertation - Of Space and Anxiety: an Inquiry into the Uncanny of Memory.

The house, built in 1972, was a project that experimented on many levels. Without a doubt, the architects played with the boundaries of private and public space, with social and design elements, and were inspired by English terraced buildings in terms of form. The materials consisted of part glass and part brick in what felt like a 40/60 proportion.

In my art practice, the threshold between body and skin, and craftsmanship, and psyche and materials has been quite fluid - and has therefore meant a lot. In my attempt to understand the concreteness of architecture as an extension of identity, as well as an attempt to define the caring object (parents) in a child's formation of self, I explored the physical impact of architecture on the psyche. An impact which, in its unknown magnitude, can feel strangely familiar - uncanny. I therefore exchanged the concept of the mother-object with that of the architecture-object, in a radical attempt to understand the ‘idea’ of the other - or the other in myself.

In WE ARE TIME, architecture has been partially replaced by urban planning, but the principle is the same. How we, in our journey, interact with the city and the planning of the city - not as something separate from us, but as an integrated and caring part of ourselves. Not as an object in and of itself, but as an extension. What we remember about the city is not an objective quantity but a subjective mapping - a series of movements we experience in our journey through various cities, which is why, in WE ARE TIME, I included both real and imaginary levels to show the fusion.

The artistic framework was quite practical and almost instructive. In addition to drawing an overall basic drawing (a kind of blueprint) that simply consisted of a square, I then divided this overall field into nine subordinate fields (substories), where each field was an autofictional city I had visited at some point in my life. Each field was inhabited by two fictional main characters who alternated between being either two girls, or a boy and a girl. If one girl was the narrator in the first story and the other girl the object of the story, the same girl would become the object of the story for the other person, girl or boy, in the next - and so on.

The novel WE ARE TIME is a kind of reverse coming-of-age story, written as nine fragments, where the characters at the beginning of the novel move in a spiral - from the outermost field (being older) towards the innermost (see drawing), being younger. In addition, the motivation for structuring the story fragmentarily is a desire to simultaneously activate and emerge an underlying blueprint - or story - through the reader's own associations.

I tried to make this appear in a form of topographical overlay: individual areas (sentences, repetitions, topics) from each field drop backward and forward reference points to the others. The aim was to create an awareness of the reader’s own underlying associations and images, which - as a layer in the topography - actively create their own story. A story based on the connections formed through the fragmentary structure, which, like the basic drawing of a house, becomes a kind of personal blueprint. A unifying element. For each reader, that blueprint becomes the novel.

*Images above: One is the layout for when building the story, and the other is an image of a blueprint of a house drawn by the Sumerians on clay, approximately 5,000 years ago.

© Camilla Howalt