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  • Species NichesHarrison Atelier

OMI International Arts Center, Ghent, New York, 2014

Seth and Ariane Harrison’s design practice, Harrison Atelier, occupies a zone of commixture between architecture and performance art. Many of their projects involve close collaborations with choreographers, directors, and composers, and include the live staging of performance events around physical sets, props, and architectural installations. Harrison Atelier’s performance-installation work concentrates on problems at the crux of technology and cultural life. This conceptually driven practice has explored issues such as the aging body, industrial animal farming, pharmacological domination, and species discrimination in the age of the Anthropocene. Their spaces are laced with tales from Greek mythology, such as Anchises, a co-creation with choreographer Jonah Bokaer, which alludes to Aeneas carrying his father Anchises out of a burning Troy. The work selected here, Species Niches, plays with the idea of human dominance over non-human species.

Commissioned by the OMI International Arts Center in Ghent, New York, Species Niches is a 1,200-square-foot oak and steel canopied pavilion that draws inspiration from the structural logic of the “reciprocal frame,” in which no single hierarchy governs the network of structural members. However, like the contingent relationships of species within an ecology, the geometries of the design are interdependent. An initial performance work by choreographer Silas Reiner and composer Loren Dempster marked the opening of the pavilion in June 2014. Percussionists play on the range of high and low tones produced by the pavilion’s varied wood structural elements, designed to serve both as a musical instrument and an outdoor set, while dancers explore the myriad spatial relationships embedded in the reciprocal frame geometry.

Other works, such as Pharmacophore, have similarly engaged architectural design as a form of spatial instrumentation. Pharmacophore was performed in 2012 at the Storefront for Art & Architecture, a gallery in New York City designed by architect Steven Holl and artist Vito Acconci. Of Pharmacophore, Holl remarked, “I was excited to see how [they] used the entire place as an instrument, which was the main aim that Vito and I envisioned.” Harrison Atelier’s approach to space-as-instrument shares a lineage with the early performance works of Diller + Scofidio as well as John Cage, specifically Variations VII of 1966, in which New York City’s environmental sounds and the Armory itself (the building produces a six-second echo) became “players” in the piece. Eschewing the idea of architecture as object, Harrison Atelier embraces performance and conceptual art as a modality of questioning the supposed fixity and purpose of architectural design. [End Page 22]


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Species Niches performance pavilion at OMI International Arts Center. Courtesy Harrison Atelier.

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