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Architect / Illustrator / PhD candidate in Architectural Design / Senior Teaching Fellow at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL liangifi_at_gmail_dot_com / Unless stated otherwise, all work on this blog is made by Ifigeneia Liangi, Athens, 1988.

30 May 2012

The Lover's Tree House _ a little bit of monument for poetry






Somewhere in a Film’s map, in the Future of 2013

It's six o'clock in the morning, or silence past six, I can't remember.

The drawing of the city has one line on it and is now left without any passengers whatsoever.

It seems that light forgot the time of day and shadows search for their identities.

Horizons are hiding themselves from the sky,

a beam of light leans on the wall of a Giant

and proposes to him a walk in the city.

In the middle of it all sits a future without an umbilical cord,

whose aim is to inhabit the shadows on 300mm ochre walls,

use the rain as a means of communication

and keep all the tables of the city out into the light.

The drawing of the city has one line and a staircase on it.

But I'll put a ramp.

The sun might be disabled tomorrow.


Athens 2013

https://vimeo.com/39081021

Please copy-paste the link to watch the animation on vimeo.

This is a short story about Athens in magic realism.
A film I made in the frame of my thesis in the diploma course at the Bartlett.

In Athens 2013, a primary school inhabited by 300 students
has formed its own ways of ruling one of the most devastated
neighbourhoods of the city, and is about to expand its boundaries
in the following years. The school’s architectural rules
demand obligatory cooperation between the neighbourhood’s
inhabitants for the production of a jam made from oranges found
on neratzies, trees that grow throughout the city and that can
withstand its pollution.

Obligatory cooperation is applied equally to each of the twelve
political teams formed within the school. Motivation for the
school’s rules to be obeyed comes from the potential unlocking
of closed playgrounds, guarded by the giant tree-man. These
playgrounds are supported by the columns of the National Bank of
Greece, which now make watermelon ice cream.

Allegory is researched as a tool for an anti-propagandistic
approach to socio-political criticism in uncertain times, and is
designed through a porous, ruinous and magic realist approach.

The notion of porosity is expressed in the unstructured boundaries
between the private and public realm, while the ruin is seen as an
essential fragment for the appropriation of the present. In order
to design for a city in crisis, I am using a magic realist narrative:
this is not a detailed projection of the future, but a socio-political
poetic critique of the present, forming potential ways of dealing
with it through possible but improbable realities.