: research at bauhaus
 
 
At the Bauhaus in Dessau, Joynes is working on a new series Ghosts in Berlin (2008) and in Queenstown, Singapore (2009). This series builds on the idea of the echo of human presence in structures and spaces. A sense of constructed historicity.

In November 2008 working with performers from the UK, Australia and Netherlands Joynes created a pilot project at the Hansaviertel - the site of the 1957 InterBau exhibition in Berlin. The work was created at the Akademie der Künste and under the V-support at the Niermeier building. Using performer-movement tracked by lighting elements this project creates a socio-archeological three dimensional space which captures the trace of human activity, movement, contact with each other and with the space itself.

 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Other Research

The collapse of urban spaces beyond the era of the strip mall and the echo of human activity and historicity in abandoned urban structure

How important is it to recognize the ontology of urban structures as they relate to their human builders and occupants over time? In their construction and preservation the cities evoke power, functionality and utopian social vision. Yet, inherent in the structure are the very forces of entropy that lead to their own collapse revealing a critical power struggle between the builder, the inhabitant and the physical forces of nature.

Joynes works with the concept of human resonance in urban centers:  to examine the historicity[1], absence, entropy and the borderlines drawn between society/urban structure and its collapse in nature - to evoke the sense of conflict between the Foucaultian power of modern urban structure to resist change and entropy – both human (destruction and change) and natural (time and element)".[2]

Structure reveals its purpose and linguistic form most poignantly when it is subjected to time, weather, banlieu-burning, and the fragility of its own materials. Nature’s continual triumph. And truth in structure is both revealing and beautiful.[3]

[1] For a description of historicity I am choosing the definition given by anti-utopian novelist Philip K Dick in his novel The Man in the High Castle which describes an object  as  inherently having a memory of history or event.: “He gives her two very similar-looking cigarette lighters, one of which is worth 'maybe forty or fifty thousand dollars on the collector's market.' Why? Because of 'the historicity’. She said, 'what is "historicity”?’ When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt's pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn't. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing .... You can't tell which is which. There's no "mystical plasmic presence", no "aura" around it. Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, pages 65-66 , Penguin Books, London 1962]

[2] Gordon Matta-Clark with his anarchitecture ‘building-cuts’ facilitated not only the process of reading entropy in structure but also integrating the concept into our own language.

[3] Alan Weisman in The world without us describes how erosion can with time completely erase the visible footprint of mankind  in urban centers such as New York bringing about the natural stasis.