Stringing

Stringing is an open operation performed in space and/or on objects by using plenty of string –to redefine space by alienating, to relocate objects by estrangement and to create a spider-like environment. Stringing a small object is not a time-consuming effort– nor it is a meaningful one, except for decorative purposes. Rather than simply wrapping and by this, decorating an object, stringing is an anarchic experiment directed against the founded meanings of space and the setting of objects. Marcel Duchamp’s One Mile of String installation dating back to 1942 was an anticipatory approach and a premature towards a space invasion act. Duchamp simply weaved an ordinary peinture exhibition space by producing a coordinated impenetration. From that date onwards, there have been numerous attempts to allude the visible tensions of a given spatial entity. The staggering potential of any stringing action is that even a small amount of appropriate string can play with and change the basis of our spatial perception. Imagine a big, heavy, wooden table overlapping and dominating a room. After a tedious, if not fatiguing stringing work, this symbol of stasis is being levitated by some slender string. A finite number of reference points for hooking has sufficed to hoover that dense object’s eternal capacity to dominate space. And not only wrappings –retracing an arris or an edge, exploding a surface, colliding a floor line with a wall line (to form unexpected, improvised ruled surfaces), creating a tensioned nod in the void are only a few to exemplify. Theoretically, stringing is an infinite process –if you have two columns to span and weave, by walking through and winding one roll after another to knit a fibrous, continuous, horizontal, impenetrable surface on a marathon-like performance, there is no obstacle except for the limitation of stocked material. Stringing can create event-spaces that can only be perceived and conceived properly by a bodily experience. Due to their fragility and delicate visuality, the penetration of the viewer and her/his wandering is a prerequisite for this kind of installations. Stringing will work perfectly in the architectural studio –for both as an individual creation and as collective work.

References 

Şentürk, L. (2012). Pomi. A Decade of a Design Studio. Trans. Osman Şişman. Esogü Publications, Eskişehir.