Film

  • ex-Timity
  • GRANTEE
    New-Territories/[elf/b^t/c]:
    Camille Lacadée &
    François Roche
    GRANT YEAR
    2015

New-Territories/[elf/b^t/c]: Camille Lacadée & François Roche, Robotic-secretion process, ex-Timity, 2016. Courtesy of the artists.

Ex-Timity consists in a "model-prototype in process" along with a short film, both derived from two tales Councillor Krespel by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Blue Beard by Charles Perrault. In the pursuit of a work already engaged, it is about generating a Siamese production where the architectural fragments, the "Props" become a vector for fiction, and articulate simultaneously a scenario for an architecture producing a film and reciprocally...Here, the piece is derived from the first part of the novel in which the Councillor Krespel encloses his own daughter, Antonia, and prevents her from singing, from her inclination towards a morbid bliss...in the literal sense. The short film originating from this makes visible a suspended moment, in the meanders of her psyche, where she ponders whether or not to live her pleasure, mixing life and death drives, physiological and pathological pathologies. The monologue at the end of the film reintroduces the debate between Charcot and Freud on the origins of the state of torpor, the loss of consciousness, inanimate body, state of exaltation, passionate state, suspension of the will (Sabina Spielrein, Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being). We can see in Antonia's behaviour the premises of this debate on hysteria, considered by Charcot as a neurocerebral disease, a pathological trouble, genital neurosis which would enable the disqualification of the feminine gender and its humours, associating it with convulsionary troubles, of pathological origins (in opposition to medieval beliefs of bodies being "possessed by the devil"). Freud will shatter the organismic theories of Charcot, scoring hysterical ecstasy as a psychic pathology, whose care requires an intelligible device bound to language and not a mise en abime, a spectacle with the doctor as the master of ceremony. Antonia in the research Ex-Timity is in this moment of interrogation, a century before the debate between Charcot and Freud. She identifies the two hypotheses as an external authority upon her body, both attempting to format her behaviour. Following Charcot's hypothesis of a physiological disease, she can allow herself to be in representation, exhibitionist...science gives her that right. In Freud's view, she is a zone of passage to the unconscious which can only unfold via language, speech, analysis, and its discursive corollary.

[eIf/b^t/c] is an institute for contingent scenarios created in 2011 by cofounders Camille Lacadée and François Roche (New-Territories).

Camille Lacadée graduated from the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris (2009), after passing her RIBA Part 1 (2008) from the Architectural Association in London. Since then, she has lived and worked in Asia (Japan, India, and Thailand) and is currently codirecting the New-Territories [eIf/b^t/c] architectural studio in Bangkok, while teaching workshops and studios at several universities. Evolving between architecture and film, she designed and realized several sets for [eIf/b^t/c] short films, for the filmmaker Clara Kraft and the choreographer Jitti Chompee, exploring intimate relationship between the two disciplines.

François Roche is president of the research laboratory at New-Territories, cofounder/principal of R&Sie(n) studio, and has served as visiting professor for master classes at the GSAPP, UPenn, and the University of Michigan. Through these activities, his architectural works articulate the real and/or fictional, as well as the geographic situations and narrative structures that can transform them. His designs have been shown at various institutions, such as Columbia University (1999–2000), UCLA (1999–2000), the ICA (London, 2001), the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2004), the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2003), the MAM/Musée d'Art Moderne (Paris, 2005 and 2006), the Tate Modern (London, 2006), and Orléans/ArchiLab (1999, 2001, 2003). Work by R&Sie(n) and New-Territories was selected for exhibition at the French pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennales in 1990, 1996, 2000, and 2002 (they declined the invitation that year) and for the international section in 2000, 2004, and 2008; additional appearances at the Biennale were in 2010 (the International and Austrian pavilions), 2012 (at the critics roundtable), and 2014 (Bembop). Roche coedited Log 25, and participated in the 2014 Biennale with Timidity Symptom, a project by the contemporary art museum in Bangkok, with Camille Lacadee.