Sarah Mills

https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/news/articles/understanding-the-urban-commons/

Through analysis of current living and working conditions of day labourers who inhabit the area of San’ya, Ghosts of Tokyo (2017) creates a new urban commons which challenges the notion of Tokyo as a dense city. Using bamboo as a means of defining territory and creating a new social infrastructure, the day labourers of San’ya support not only themselves but the community as a whole. This essay film by Sarah Gerrish, in collaboration with tutors Sarah Mills and Doreen Bernath, exemplifies the unique theatrical and filmic sets methodology probed by the Cinematic Commons design and research studio. Since 2013, Cinematic Commons have developed a critical, diverse body of urban propositions in response to infrastructural themes of ‘Interchange’, ‘Water’, ‘New Nature’, ‘Subtraction’, ‘Decommissioned’, ‘Scapes’ and ‘Affectivity’, and seek to catalyse genuinely public, proactive and productive urban transformations. One critical intention has been to explore new relations between a plurality of interrogative mediums and the architectural possibility of ‘commoning’. Based in Leeds, Cinematic Commons interweaves strategies of essay film, cinematic forensics, story/spaceboards, set models and layered scenes, composite drawing and 1:1 installation in contexts of Mumbai, Mexico City, Tokyo, London, Berlin, Marseille and Beijing to develop architectural interventions as urban commons. Works seek to remedy the disintegration of the public domain as that which is active, collective and productive. The unit has formed a number of international partnerships through public events, symposiums, workshops, exhibitions and publications in collaboration with Studio X Mumbai of GSAPP, Columbia University; The Tetley Gallery, Leeds; Taller13, Mexico City and the National Autonomous University of Mexico; Cinematic Architecture Tokyo and The Faculty of Design, Kyushu University; AAVS Tropicality; raumlabor and Berlin University of the Arts

The curators of the 14th Shanghai Biennale, 2023: ‘Cosmos Cinema’ at Power Station of Art, Shanghai, propose that ‘film is a cosmic phenomenon, and that cinema is well placed as a medium to change our understanding of the universe and our place within it’ . In the exhibition catalogue proposals by German philosopher Alexander Kluge present the cosmos as a form of cinema, the index of all events which are recorded by the light traces, they leave behind and the connection is made with the early twentieth century Russian movement ‘cosmism’, a precursor of transhumanism, which proposed a move to regulate the forces of nature . This paper embraces the Cosmos Cinema exhibition format of montage to focus on the recombination of elements to produce new meanings exploring different ways in which humanity interacts with and understands the context of the universe by delving into experiments for space settlements and how these unsettle our understanding of life and living on our planet. How does the legacy of ‘space settlements’ in film manifest current issues of ecological, socio-political and economic crisis scenarios? Urth by Ben Rivers (2016) and Extra-Terrestrial Ecologies by Ralo Mayer (2018) are experimental films which both include footage from inside Biosphere 2, the space settlement prototype, in Arizona. River’s protagonist is the last woman on Earth, a logbook accounts her struggles with sustaining her world and Mayer speculates that the ‘ninth biospherian’ is a ghost. Both films are a cinematic exploration of past and future space which examine transformations of humans and human cultures via what River suggests are ‘temporary autonomous zones’ or which Mayer labels ‘un-earthing’. Here the audience experience amazement at phenomena characterized by the fact that they become apparent only in the experience of a postapocalyptic time - a little part of the universe finally reaches your body. What would an endeavor such as Biosphere 2 mean today in terms of relationships with the body and the natural? From a historical-philosophical perspective and to follow Benjamin and Agamben, what remains in a time that has already begun to end or how does ‘cosmic wonder’ overcome conflicting and overlapping ideologies on earth that really map its territory?

The Gaze of Commoning - Doreen Bernath & Sarah Mills. Our studio, 'Cinematic Commons’, joins film techniques with scenographic constructs and architectural interventions in public space. Through the 'essayistic gaze’ and 'journeying take’ we bring the camera’s reflective gaze to strategies of recursive narrative (changing the measure of distance), montage (changing the scale of time) and translations from the personal to the collective, to articulate a complex range of 'commonness’ in face of disparities and boundaries.

In architecture, transgressive acts have always been a reality, in spite of rules and canons that have defined the discipline and its extended field. However, in recent decades their frequency and radicality have surged from rather random, marginal and/or idiosyncratic phenomena. While their sudden rise can be explained as a response to the compulsive normativity of modernity, the deeper root is to be sought elsewhere: the recent waves of transgressiveness are intimately linked to the hypercrisis affecting our world today – spanning ecological, political, economic, and social dimensions, and catalysing fundamental mutations and disorders. Some of these transgressive acts are motivated by a desire to dismantle a malfunctioning system, but more often than not breaking the rules has become an inherent survival tactic amid urgent social challenges. In our era of after-modernity, transgression emerges not just as an act of defiance but reveals a new paradigm at work – a critical framework for reimagining the built environment, challenging established orders, and advocating for the rights of marginalised populations. Through a rich array of empirical case studies and theoretical insights, this volume provides a unique, forward-looking perspective on transgressive acts in architecture as responses to today’s ecological, political, economic, and social crises.

This chapter questions how culture becomes recognised as Intangible Cultural Heritage in Japan, and in what context people have, and continue to collectively practise, ‘tradition’ through their experience of modernity? The community’s involvement in the production of ‘The Who’s Who of the Machiya’ and ‘Unagino Nedoko’ films is proposed as one of the catalysts to a metamorphic character in the building and craft traditions in Yame City. Ultimately, film is suggested as a way to reconsider possible relationships between past and present and as a tool to unearth new knowledge, communicate a shared understanding of spaces, and change the scope of the ‘architectural project’.

This chapter will examine three realized projects in Leeds and York, England, to question the legacy and value of temporal use within the city and the connections between affect and place. The three case studies are; an established annual light based festival, a single night pop up cinema, and an art installation sited on a disused viaduct. Each project questions the future use of our heritage buildings, their sites and context. The case studies form destinations, which are not part of an established cultural heritage trail or route. The action of making and doing reverses our analysis of art and film from a tool we were using to help understand a place, to a medium that helped to define a place as a meanwhile use. Simon Baker is a protagonist who worked to re-appropriate the underutilized spaces and Sarah Mills is a lecturer of Architecture and uses film and Situationist techniques to analyse the subversion of the everyday. Challenging the normative modes of architectural practice engenders collaboration and questions existing policies, guidelines, buildings and the current purpose of place.