DIPTYQUES / fragment indéterminé, fragment indéfini

“Combes shoots her architectural subjects in what she terms “a non-hierarchical rampage”…

In her series, Interieurs, Marie Combes photographs architecture as the archaic and the ruined, alluding to both Palladian drawings and 17th century painting in mock romantic concern for the eviscerated form. In so doing, Combes simultaneously strips architecture of its typical decorum and liberates photography from its documentarian pretexts. The result is a composite fiction, a series of formal coincidences that frame and construct new dynamic, non-existent spaces.
Combes shoots her architectural subjects in what she terms “a non-hierarchical rampage”, moving through space and concentrating on the experiential fragment. Later she scours through her contract sheets selecting evocative adjacencies which she consequently prints in a diptych format. In other words, she pairs only those images which appear back to back on the contact sheet. Her process is thus one of imposed discovery, productive fluidity and authorial abdication. Interieurs pairs two perspectival fragments in order to produce a third, wholly autonomous representation of space. The new perspective is a spatial provocation: discordant floor plates, compound light sources, the suggestion of folded planes, a multiplicity of thresholds, and schizophrenic subjectivity. It is a spatial assemblage whose meaning is solicited by the realm of the non-image, by the in between, by the axis as fissure. In other words, the connective tissue of the image is essential to the geometric (re)ordering and choreography of the resulting space.”
Anya Sirota

Extract publication / Le Zine
Civicfriche / Journal of Emergent Urbanity
http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=723

Sirota works on interdisciplinary projects that deploy cultural programming and urban interventions to activate public space and impact perception. Her innovative design and research has been exhibited and published widely, and she has lectured on the subject of urban activation to a broad range of audiences. She holds a degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where she was awarded the Araldo Cossutta Prize for Design Excellence, and an undergraduate degree in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. She teaches architecture at the University of Michigan and directs the ArcPrep program in Detroit.