Multifarious experiences of cities are brought forward in Copenhagen Architecture Festival (CAFx)’s impressive Film Mosaic—from life-affirming experiences of cities as potential, if not real, spaces of play, dance, social exchange and community-building, to claustrophobic experiences of trapped, suffocating life. To the authors of this short reflection essay, a series of films depicting the latter kind, have made a powerful impact. Filmmakers from countries as diverse as Azerbaijan, Georgia, Canada, Uruguay, Tunisia, United Kingdom and Spain offer artistic expressions of how persons in today’s urban life may be unable to thrive, to differentiate themselves, to find rootedness, calmness, sanity or safety.
Some of these films display experiences of sensual fragmentation and disconnection: disturbing visual and audial changes are registered merely as flickering light and buzzing noise. Others emphasize the emotional overpressure generated by city life, resulting in numbness and indifference, if not anger. Yet others present urban life as boxed life, materially and mentally. What does not fit into the little boxes—constructed on the basis of “sameness”, normalizing standards—is either eradicated as unlivable lifeform, or hidden under the surface. The message which seems to reappear, in the otherwise diverse depictions, is that the cities of today do not allow many of its inhabitants to live with the kind of agency that comes from inclusion in the larger community, nor to inhabit city spaces as spaces of belonging.
Boxed Life by Miranda Namicheishvili
Experiences of non-belonging may stem from physical or psychological conditions of vulnerability, or from various forms of discrimination. But many of the films in the Film Mosaic indicate that the city does something to everyone—which in turn enhances mechanisms of inequality, exposure and discrimination. What does the city do, then? This may be grasped through the contrasting life form presented by a number of the films in question: life rooted in nature. What the human voices of these films convey is that life in nature, as something separate from the built environment’s essential demarcations of an inside and outside of every space, makes possible moments or feelings of belonging and of being “oneself”—whether in the form of free meditative moments by the sea, in a field or plain, or of longer-term encounters with the growth processes of nature, as displayed in Helen Brewer’s film “Growing Solidarity”.
Growing Solidarity by Helen Brewer
Any human being, like any plant or animal, belongs to the networks of nature. Nature is all outside, and as such it does not judge a person’s position as to inclusion in whatever insides comprise the urban environment. Nature is, in this specific sense, silent on inclusion. This silence makes possible the opening of inner, mental spaces in which thought may evolve freely, without limitation. Whereas the city engenders experiences of having no room for one’s own thoughts, the silence of nature regarding spatial and social inclusion gives room for mental life, just as it does for physical life.
Experiences of time change as well. For some, the de-tensification of body and mind happening in nature finally allows time to flow naturally; others indicate that spiritual or dream-like experiences of “motionless time” may become reachable, or at least imaginable. Life is finally “de-boxed”.
Hinda Rezgui: The Forgotten Echo (Tunisia)
These interrelated issues—having room for one’s own thoughts, having room for oneself, and the connections between physical and mental room—made us think of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking 1929 essay, “A Room Of One’s Own”. Woolf emphasizes the importance of having, as a female writer, a steady income and a room of one’s own (something which was generally unheard of at the time) in order for thought and creativity to flow freely. But does this room of one’s own need to be behind closed doors? To some extent, yes; Woolf’s demand is to be understood quite literally. On the other hand, Woolf’s essay makes clear that this “room of one’s own” is meant to serve not isolation, but “reality”:
When I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality […] now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. […] It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech […]1
And indeed, it appears that this “room of one’s own” may be unfolded in nature, as well, and in a manner which means that “thought” and “river” may practically become one:
The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree […]. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought - to call it by a prouder name than it deserved - had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it […]2
What is at stake for Woolf, is, accordingly, not only the right of women to be able to close their doors and reside in sovereign privacy in rooms of their own. Woolf draws a direct link between experiences of inner freedom and experiences of being intensely connected to the world, be that the world of the city or that of nature.
Arguably, this link is not only relevant to female writers of the early 20th century, but to many human inhabitants of cities today experiencing claustrophobia when it comes to both physical and mental room. Physically and mentally, many urban citizens have no room of their own, no room in which they feel they belong and can act with agency. And—seemingly paradoxically—this lack of a room of one’s own concerns fundamentally a lack of connectedness to the world, a lack of belonging.
However, in order to capture more profoundly the element of “being connected to the world” in contemporary conditions, we need to rephrase Woolf’s question. What could “a room of one’s own” mean, today? Where might it be? And in what sense would it be “one’s own”?
Interestingly, CAFx’s Film Mosaic contains a few films which directly considers that one’s private room might not at all feel like one’s room. “After my hand got injured, I started to feel unfamiliar with my room. My room is not my room. The relation between space and myself has changed rapidly”. So speaks the main character of Hui-Yi Yang’s film “My Room”. She leaves her private room and finds a non-alienating room in the city park where plants and animals are close to her, insects are crawling on her skin. Likewise, the protagonist of Adrian Pedrazas Profumo’s “Desarraigo”—a dual, pregnant character—leaves her private room which drives her mad with confusing thoughts of “yours” and “mine” and finds rootedness in a nature which belongs to no-one.
For these and other filmmakers of CAFx’s Film Mosaic, it appears that the room in which one is able to feel most profoundly as “oneself” is a room undefined by built structure and owned by no-one. It is a room in which one’s “ownness" melts into the larger networks to which one belongs.
1-2: Virginia Woolf, “A room of one’s own”, in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, Oxford University Press, p. 83
Profumo - Desarraigo (Deracination) by Adrian Pedrazas
May contemporary cities somehow learn from such experiences of escaping the claustrophobia of social judgment and boxed life, of being able to be “oneself”, of gaining a feeling of space afforded, while melting into larger networks?
Firstly, it should be underlined that the experiences of nature presented in the films should not be universalized—even if what they capture may be found across cultural differences. What is experienced in nature depends not only on nature, but on what is projected onto nature, and on what is built and how the guarded insides and outsides of an urban built environment bear down on the people within it.
Nature is many things, as are we, the people that are part of it. Nature is also disaster, chaos and destruction. The breathtaking film by Siavash Eydani, “The Note”, depicts a work-room—a room with a chair, table and notebook—which is literally flooded by nature. It is placed in the middle of the sea, in the middle of rising waters, just like the bedroom next to it which already carries the marks of death and loss. This film also locates human “rooms” within the larger networks of nature, but from an immensely tragic perspective—the perspective of those who already experience the consequences of both climate collapse and the inequality crisis.
Yet, without universalizing what constitutes life in nature, there is arguably something important to reflect upon in the possible link between experiences of inner freedom, on the one hand, and experiences of being connected to, and belonging to the world, on the other. “Selfhood” does not necessarily confront connectedness by way of contrast; the two might in fact accompany each other. The question is, however, how such a link between “selfhood” and “connectedness” can be made relevant within contemporary urban life, as well as in the disciplines of architecture, landscape design and planning, as they interact with and shape urban environments.
The Note by Siavash Eydani
For decades architects have, in theory and praxis, sought to respond to the heritage of modernism: to counter functional divisions and segmentation, rationalization and non-inclusive planning. But establishing truly inclusive urban spaces constitutes no easy task. The open—and yet endlessly differentiated—spaces of nature which allows for illimitable self-mirroring and immersion in connectedness cannot simply be copied in the built environment. But those grown spaces might be allowed to seep into urban life, to create networks that negate the insides and outsides of buildings, and open the city to de-boxed experiences. The built environment establishes, inevitably, boundaries, distinctions between inside and outside. Likewise, the silent, non-judging characteristics of nature (or so it seems, at least) hardly knows a city-parallel. But we might be able to grow those spaces, one by one, if we embrace both the heartbreak brought forward by the Film Mosaic of CAFx and by the knowledge that rooms of connectedness do exist.
As an image of this, and in a final image of this essay, we would like to bring forward Mariana Garcia Etcheverry’s film “Voids & Bodies. An Evening in Las Pioneras Feminist Space". The film depicts people coming together, through dance, and establishing a space in the process as they transform a void into a transient rhythmic structure—a space of inclusion for those present, and a space of connectedness.
FACT BOX
The Film Mosaic: Leave No One Behind film competition open call looks for films addressing inclusive architectural or design solutions found in the built, planned and/or grown environment
- max 3 min. long,
- deadline: 1st of March 2023
- prize: 1st: 2500€; 2nd 1500€; 3rd: 1000€
Films are received on a daily basis and published ongoingly on the Film Mosaic platform.
With the aim of facilitating the production of short films, since Summer 2021 Copenhagen Architecture Festival has been conducting film & architecture workshops with a focus on inclusivity and filmmaking in close collaboration with local partner institutions around the world.
Among the remarkable films of the CAFx Film Mosaic: Leave No One Behind, the above essay takes special inspiration from:
Kanan Gayibov: Giynannn (Azerbaijan)
Darya Safarova, Gudrat Gurban, Sevan Mohammadpour: Samad Vurghun (Azerbaijan)
Rana Ahmadova: The Darkness in the Light (Azerbaijan)
Hui-Yi Yang: My Room. (Taiwan/DK)
Miranda Namicheishvili: Boxed Life (Georgia)
Siavash Eydani: The Note (Iran)
Ketevan Margania: Encounter (Georgia)
Ronak Ghandi: (Dis)connection (Canada)
Mariana Garcia Etcheverry: Voids & Bodies: An Evening in Las Pioneras Feminist Space (Uruguay)
Hinda Rezgui: The Forgotten Echo (Tunisia)
