Our territory, our possibilities, should be so ravishing...
The documents that follow, hewn from the collusion of territory and utopia, record the transit of bodies through space, built and otherwise (focus not restricted to things as they are). They suggest that utopia is not a future ideal, but a current practice: “a searing, futuristic retinal trope that oddly offered an intelligibility to the present” (Office for Soft Architecture). “We saw,” the Office writes, “that we could lift it and use it like a lens.” Here we find buildings that never were, unreliable memories, impossible hopes, exaggerated fears, false promises—real things. I believe this research is straightforward and useful, also beautiful. But what else? What frame, if any? Rich Jensen phoned from the train as it pulled into Tacoma and suggested “heterodoxy.” I had told him I was having trouble with the first paragraph of this introduction and he called to say the bridges and textures of Tacoma made him think of heterodoxy. I was in the swimming pool and could not answer. Then Lisa Robertson e-mailed a passage from Paul Celan: “Topos research? By all means! But in light of what’s to be explored: in light of U-topia. And human beings? And creatures. In this light.” And so, in this light we present research by all means. Heterodoxy. A hodge-podge: fiction, photos, poetry, catalogs, historical facts, a cartoon—the narrowly objective hard by the expansively subjective. The plurality of genres pleased me. Any account of our territory bereft of, say, facts, poetry, projections, wild speculation, polemics, or sketchy memory, would seem to me to be fatally compromised. As the Office for Soft Architecture puts it in their Fourth Walk: “[We] painted the place in the polis of the sour heat and the pulse beneath our coats, the specific entry of our exhalations and words into the atmosphere…Our method was patience. We would slowly absorb each image until we were what we had deliberately chosen to become. Of course then we ourselves were the documents; we acquired a fragility. Hello my Delicate we would repeat when we met by chance in the streets under the rows of posters Hello my Delicate...
...As the Office for Soft Architecture concludes in their Fourth Walk: “The trees of the park became mystical, and we permitted ourselves to use this shabby word because we were slightly fatigued from our exercises and our amusements and because against the deepening sky we watched the blue-green green-gold golden black-gold silver-green green-white iron-green scarlet tipped foliage turn black. No birds now; just the soft motors stroking the night. Stillness. We went to our tree. It was time for the study of the paradox called lust. Our chests burst hugely upwards to alight in the branches, instrumental and lovely, normal and new. It was time for the lyric fallen back into teeming branches or against the solid trunk gasping…” Our territory, our possibilities, should be so ravishing."
Matthew Stadler
