Output details

Calenture I / II

Lee was invited as co-researcher to join ‘field labs’ in Britain and Sweden (funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond/Swedish Research Council, convened by Maria Hellestrom Reimer) addressing the conception/representation of two diversely stratified cultural/physical landscapes. The study was undertaken under the auspices of Land Use Poetics an inter-national/disciplinary network of arts researchers enquiring into methods of spatial projection/technologies and imaginaries of land use. Making/exhibiting work within the condensed time frame of four days, Lee’s interest lay in literalising this ‘brief encounter’ (with reference to land and feminist art practices) so as to engender a ‘corporeal situation’ (rather than attaining a cognitive position).

In Malmo/Lund Lee ‘immersed’ herself in the ‘landscape’ that was her object of study, climbing, with her eyes closed, to the top diving board of a local swimming pool and jumping ‘blind’ into the water below; recasting/gendering the transcendent impulse of Klein’s iconic leap. The resulting video records the optical disruption caused to the gridded pattern of the pool’s tiled floor by the impact of her body hitting the water. In Thanet the submersion and revelation of a tidal swimming pool by the turning tide, disrupting the clean, square lines of its concrete frame, was recorded over a 2-hour period.

Both videos articulate a set of tensions, as described in Lee’s accompanying text/image work ‘Entering the Field’ (Land Use Poetics, Lund: 2011, ISBN: 978-91-576-9011-1) between the ordering/containing affinities of the grid/square, a key ideological/structural device within Modernist spatial thought, and the plenitude of the field (or rather its watery equivalent). For Hellestrom Reimer, discussing the project in seminars given at Malmo University and The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (2011/12) Lee’s leap into the “uncanny negative of a positive and substantial ‘land’” can be understood as effecting “a potential shift in paradigm, passing from one morphology to another”.