AINE WALKER

'Anamnesis: Connective (Re)Collections investigates the connective agent of storytelling, in architectural drawing and social practices. The project engages with city space through alternate realities and methodologies, celebrating the values in being metaphorically ‘unclassified’ within a collection, lost within a labyrinth, and immersed within fantastic imaginative fields. Each working methodology responds to & transcends existing social and spatial disjunctions within Lisbon’s urban fabric.

‘The Bazaar’ provides a collective space which replaces inauthentic experience, collapsing principles of cultural display, existing colonial attitudes and ethnographic boundaries separating the city's inhabitants. Identities, cultures, and languages become fused through the reconnective agent of narrative and spoken exchange. Through the collection and the re-projection of user’s stories, across several city sites, a process of anemisis occurs, resulting in a transcendence of both inner and outer space for city user’s.

The collective spaces are (re)assembled using fragments of disembodied object, disregarding physical and metaphorical hierarchies, while utilising magical realism as a drawing technique and socio-political critique.  Curious assemblies, mistranslated language and paths misled are celebrated within the Bazaar, as magical & unintentional collisions occur. As user’s circulate, the stories exchanged are collected, recorded, and stored within the ‘Repository Tower’. The Tower acts as a connective hinge mobilizing people from Baixa, upwards to St Georges Castle, and provides viewing platforms for users to contemplate their transformational walk, whilst overlooking the city & Bazaar below. The collected stories are eventually re-transmitted to synthetic & immersive experiences across the city, where they are continuously re-told. These immersive nodes occur within existing sites which are repurposed; A dolls ‘hospital’ is reimagined as a marionette theatre in the region of Baixa, and interactive synathesia rooms assembled in the historical region of Alfama – Nodes in which the architecture plays role of narrator.

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This project was successful in the 2020 RIBA Presidents Medals, winning the Part II Serjeant Prize.