Spatial Tales of Unearthly CrittersPublication, 2024Spatial Tales of Unearthly Critters tells the stories of nine creatures and their habitats. It offers an opportunity for spatial design to be practised and read within the realm of fiction and more-than-human world building, freed from the constraints of earthly bodily archetypes and normative modes of thinking. The zine assembles a multiplicity of bodies which have been imagined in response to societal urgencies. Collectively, these unearthly creatures meander between and across the intricate complexities of ‘monstrosity’ as an expanded framework to address these urgencies from the field of spatial practice.
When designing a space, we imagine how bodies might move through their environments. We imagine what kind of functions they will exercise, how they might derive pleasure or restriction, and how they might serve or be served by the space around them. More often than not, the bodies which spaces are designed for are those of able-bodied, gendered human beings of standardised proportions. As critical spatial practitioners, our curiosity motivates us to design beyond the dominant modes of understanding how space can be used. We dream up ideas and spatial configurations which dismantle stagnant blueprints for living, invite co-habitation across species, and raise questions about the origins of material and ongoing legacies of extraction. Once we free ourselves from established frameworks, reject the dominance of normative archetypes, behaviours and needs, and create space for the more-than-human, how might spatial relations materialise beyond what is accepted and familiar?
This collection of beings and their communities embodies a multitude of contradictions and tensions as flesh becomes machine and excrement becomes interior. Emerging through the cracks of fractured realities, they are unearthly in their refusal to conform to the spaces which deny their wellbeing and inflict differing forms and degrees of violence on their bodies. Each short story narrates a world from which its creature has arisen, and the spaces in which they now find themselves. Some wear their spaces like cloaks, taking refuge in anonymity. Others emerge as unruly forces breaking free from restraint. Individually, they chart the different ways in which the mechanisms of space and spatial design are at once complicit and subversive to the forces which control bodies. When assembled, these unearthly critters and their spaces present new possibilities for living. Greet each one with imagination; there is much more to their stories than meets the eye. Sit together in their space for a while, listen and unravel their stories. They might feel more familiar than you expect. You may even feel at home.
Publication Launch event photographs at Kunstinstituut Melly, captured by Sungryul Jun & Anna KrikkeProduction Process Images