Written by Khaled Sedki, Interruptions
(Catatonia workshop @Makan) image courtesy of Interruptions.ning.com
A pack of tuna was all that’s needed to trigger all the neighborhood’s cats! Though that was supposed to be my own dinner, but at times one prefers nice company to a full stomach! My little room in Lwaibdeh is quite small, but looks and feels more like a storey, just like all the houses in Lwaibdeh and Al-Balad; the case with any human built ‘accommodation’ in places with rough, dominant and phenomenal topography, ‘building’ is just a sequence of diplomatic get-arounds negotiating back-and-forth with the land’s voids, pediments and carves.
Apparently that was the case with these cats around my room! The sofa, the chairs, the empty suitcases, the table and other ‘topography’ created so many possibilities for them to play with and discover!
I curiously started observing while all objects and furniture in my room were brought to life again by hosting varieties of experiences, all items that we have made into rigid types that served standard functions turned out to be much more flexible and adaptable.
This creative diplomacy in re-accommodating objects, spaces, buildings, cities, topography…etc is a skill we lost at one point when humans possessed the tools and the technology allowing them not to bargain for their accommodations but rather enforce them. It’s a point where we lost the creative communication with our surrounding context; not only between built and natural environments, but on all scales; design, politics, economy, development, society… etc
It’s a point where we started seeing wars over oil, state terrorism instead of political and economic imperialism and Jordan Gates towers at the 6th circle replacing a public park!
The image of fully carved hills and bulk inserted buildings became so familiar, washing out neighborhoods to shove in ‘development’ projects and replacing already fitted built areas of well-balanced and well-connected social and economic strata with touristic appealing structures all became the norm of the-so-called regeneration and development of city’s built-urban-environment!
While these acquired powerful tools should’ve increased our creative diplomatic ‘design’ of our cities, buildings, society, politics and economy we find ourselves producing in the last few decades some of the least intelligent and most crude methods of human accommodations!
Design, is a creative diplomatic organizational process responsive to human needs and aware of the politics of its existing context, and is now leveled down to a matter of fulfilling needs in a way that is most similar to paid prostitutes to avoid building complicated relationships!
So cats, have preserved and developed the craft we’ve lost, re-accommodating our city in endless creative ways worthy of observing and reflecting upon our arrogant design language!
