bagging

Abstract

The projective gesture of architecture, its forward reach as an offering, anticipates a recipient. Through a systematized catcall, it interpellates a subject as the beneficiary of its offering. As Mabel Wilson has reminded us, the professionalization of this effort has helped produce the humanist subject to "consolidate a European worldview," and thereby define its margins. Bagging provides a wrinkle in the lines of this orthographic regime, of architecture's iterative inscription of this liberal subject. It is an attempt at a partial unravelling of architecture's straightening devices that orient the body toward designed ends (and align it with systems of power) and that "make certain things, and not others, available," as Sarah Ahmed puts it. It does so not to seek abolition of the line but to open design to new (deviant) subjects, like cows, crowds, and sodomites. As a set of role-playing moves at body-ish scale, bagging gathers a multiplicity of contents within soft parameters, working with textile to deny the conventional fixity of position, dimensioning, scale. Bagging invites a deviation from the orthographic view, turning our attention to that "field of unreachable objects" constituted by following lines of inscription, turning sideways to nuzzle the warm side of the cow, to dwell within a mess of bodies, to seek pleasure beyond the straight.