The Bartlett
Summer Show 2025
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Headless Bodies: Producing through Desire

Project details

Programme
Unit PG23
Year 5
Award
  • First Class Honours

This project functions as a liberating desiring-machine. Through a metaphorical critique of Cartesian theory in architectural production, the division of design (the head), and construction (the body). Headless bodies subvert this standard practice and are designed through making indeterminately at the point of desiring-production, an automatic use of the body and waste materials, to escape the architectural zeitgeist, production processes that fuel exploitation in service to surplus value. Instead, they explore alternate realities through ficto-critical narratives centred around self-determination, care, and desire. Their relationality facilitates the objects’ becoming. The intersections of alternative ideas and worlds in assemblage, through the dialogue and choreographies of the headless bodies, are explored at the scale/site of the drawing, the body, and the architectural projection.

Thing, a hybrid between furniture and body parts and created through desiring-production, is a dialogic divining rod who facilitates situated engagement in the locus of my curiosity. Photograph taken in Casa Mollino.

Thing in Dialogue with the Objects of Casa Mollino: On the Bed

Thing, a hybrid between furniture and body parts and created through desiring-production, is a dialogic divining rod who facilitates situated engagement in the locus of my curiosity. Photograph taken in Casa Mollino.

A chair intended for the user to straddle an aluminium hip, torso pressed against an aluminium spine, held by wooden limbs: re-experiencing being held against a parent again. Made through auto-body fabrication techniques and fictocritical narrative.

Alien-Superstar: Subverting the Auto-Body

A chair intended for the user to straddle an aluminium hip, torso pressed against an aluminium spine, held by wooden limbs: re-experiencing being held against a parent again. Made through auto-body fabrication techniques and fictocritical narrative.

Here lie the headless bodies, desiring-machines imbued with fictional otherworldly narratives and physically realised in this world, critiquing and counterinvesting against standard modes of architectural production with their own measure of success.

Headless Bodies

Here lie the headless bodies, desiring-machines imbued with fictional otherworldly narratives and physically realised in this world, critiquing and counterinvesting against standard modes of architectural production with their own measure of success.

Located on the rooftop racetrack of the old Lingotto assembly-line factory. The buildings form an ode to the unrealised desiring-production potential lost to a system that worked to imprison people in either their minds or bodies.

Room for Alien-Superstar

Located on the rooftop racetrack of the old Lingotto assembly-line factory. The buildings form an ode to the unrealised desiring-production potential lost to a system that worked to imprison people in either their minds or bodies.

The Value of Desiring-Production

The Value of Desiring-Production

What is gained by questioning hegemonic processes that look to repress and exploit, and creating new modes of production through experimentation and indeterminate conditions? A free mode of production leads to a free product and a liberated producer.

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The Bartlett
Summer Show 2025
26 June – 13 July
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