To Still the Eye

Cloud Pergola: The Architecture of Hospitality is a collaborative project for the Croatian national pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, which crosses the boundaries of architecture, art, engineering, robotic fabrication, and computational modelling and brings together practitioners working in art, architecture, sound, and futurology studies. The presentation is structured through an interplay of three interventions: Cloud Drawing by Alisa Andrašek, To Still the Eye by Vlatka Horvat, and Ephemeral Garden by Maja Kuzmanović / FoAM Brussels.

To Still the Eye is a series of drawings made by my bare feet immersed in an acrylic wash, as they slide across the surface of paper, leaving a trace of their journey in the form of a straight horizontal line.

Lifted from the floor to the wall, the tracks of the body moving on the firm ground become traces of imaginary movement on the outer edges of the built space. The imprints of the feet on the wall suggest a playful challenge of the body’s relation to space and to gravity, and the line – at once continuous and interrupted with the marks made by the feet falling, touching down, losing balance – appears as an attempt to scale the circumference of the room using the body’s range of movement as a measuring device.

Running around the space as a fence of sorts, the traced line points to the tangible outer boundary of the room, “confirming” the walls’ presence and solidity as a frame and a container for human action. At the same time, the line performs a certain canceling gesture, enacting a perceptual cut in the wall to suggest distances beyond the confines of the built environment. In that sense, the drawings comprising To Still the Eye conjure the horizon, as a physical manifestation of distance, an endpoint destination for the eye, and a metaphor for the future and for a sense of possibility.

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