Maria Fusco: Site writing, sensing, place.

Architecture as abstraction

0:00Hello. For architects, the nature of buildings is, arguably, as drawings. Even when on site, a building is assessed in terms of its relationship to the documents of its legal production, preeminent among which, after the contract, are the plan and elevation. As such, the buildings of architects are abstractions. To use N. Catherine Hales and Todd Gannon, architecture is always virtual, in the Deleuzean sense of being in tension with the actual. As they write, design is a mode of practice that represents a reality, but is not the reality it represents. For not architects, perhaps buildings are the sum of their stuff, materials, light, tone, smell, thresholds and transitions, which are bodily things, we should probably ask.

0:38In any case, for this week's episode of the A is for Architecture podcast, I spoke to Maria Fusco, professor and chair of interdisciplinary writing at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, about her publication Legend of the Necessary Dreamer, published by Vanguard Editions, which describes her poetic and philosophical study of the Palacio Pombal, which Maria produced for the Lisbon Architecture Triennial in 2017. It is, I think, an elegant example of how buildings might be understood both through and as bodies, textures and histories, and through a thing other than drawing.

1:10We discuss this, her work and practice, and, amazingly, Maria reads some parts of the book too, which is a lush first for this podcast. If you want to and can, please support the A is for Architecture podcast via the Patreon, or buy me a coffee link in the podcast description, where you will also find links to Maria and her book.

1:30A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space.

Meeting Maria Fusco

1:35Hello, and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. Delighted to be talking today to Professor Maria Fusco. I take it I pronounce your surname relatively accurately. Yes, perfect. Thank you.

1:52Thanks ever so much for doing this, Maria. We're going to be talking about your rather wonderful book, Legend of the Necessary Dreamer, which you published with Vanguard Editions in 2017. And we're going to do something slightly different this time, first time for this podcast anyway, which is to actually have you read some parts of this book, which we will use as the basis for our discussion. But before we get to that, Maria, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself, please? Hello, Ambrose. It's really nice to be with you.

2:24It's really nice to be returning to this book, Legend of the Necessary Dreamer. I am an interdisciplinary writer, originally from Belfast, and I live in the Scottish Highlands. I grew up beside a peaceline during the Troubles. So I have some sort of, I guess you could say, very particular sensitivities towards space and boundaries and how I, I guess, interact and perceive with them. And I think this really comes out particularly in this book, but in other works that I've made as well.

3:00What's an interdisciplinary person? Yeah, so it is someone who works across different genre. So I've made works which are critical, theoretical, performance works, occasionally fiction works. So I tend to start with my subject and an idea rather than a form. And through working in and through the material, I discover the form that the writing will come out. But I guess to say we in that, that the important bit is that the writing is the, it's the motor at all of it.

3:36So another project that I made recently, which came out in 2023, was an experimental opera film, which was made with the Royal Opera House in London called History of the Present. And so, yeah, I guess that it's interdisciplinary in the sense that the, the ways in which it comes out and goes out into the world are interdisciplinary, rather than me starting from a place of thinking, oh, I'm going to write a novella, I'm going to write an opera, etc. I start with the idea.

Training and editing

4:07So where did you train? How did you train? Yeah, so I studied fine art in Sheffield in the north of England. I left Belfast as soon as I could when I was quite young, because it was a difficult place and a dangerous place to live. I studied fine art and I, I really enjoyed in fine art, the reading and the writing. I made a little bit of stuff, but not a gigantic amount of stuff, because I sort of felt what was I going to do with all of the stuff? I felt there was already quite a lot of stuff.

4:38And then I moved down to London and really worked in like basically millions of different, not literally millions, but, you know, almost millions of different places in London, lots of galleries, lots of independent bookshops. I used to run the bookshop at the Institute of Contemporary Art, for example, the Mall. And then I eventually ended up working with a really, really cult publisher called Bookworks, who produce artist books, very kind of specialist, the sort of artist books that make her more mainstream rather than kind of livre d'artiste.

5:14So there I really learned about how to edit. I'd always been writing, but as a writer, it's really important, I guess, to, to learn how to edit others' words in a kind of respectful and meaningful way, rather than trying to impose your own view upon the words. So from then, I then moved into academia. I ran, I devised and ran a new course at Goldsmiths called MFA Art Writing, which brought together all sorts of different types of theoretical and practice-based writers.

5:46And at that stage, I actually did an M.A. at Goldsmiths. And I, I, so I was running an M.A. without having done an M.A. And really, I did that because Goldsmiths paid for me to do an M.A. So I'm kind of, with my working class background, I'm quite, you know, parsimonious with, with, with high approach education. I ran that programme, which is very well received and successful for five to six years and then moved to Scotland. So I, I started off working in Edinburgh.

6:19Then I also took the opportunity at Edinburgh to do a PhD in kind of critical writing, again, because it was paid for. And then I, I find myself moving northwards. So now I'm in the Scottish Islands. As far away from urban Belfast as sort of? Almost, almost, almost. Shetland would be the dream. Would it? Yes, for me. Based with no trees. Tell me a little bit about this book.

Residency at Palacio Pombal

6:51Where does it come from? And I guess, how does it fit into your practice? I love this wee book, actually. This is why I'm so chuffed to be speaking with you today. Anyway, so in 2013, I was invited to be the writer in residence at Lishboa Architectural Triennial. And that was curated by Beatrice Gallilee. And I was invited by Beatrice and one of the co-curators, Mariana Pestana, to be writer in residence. And I don't think they had a writer in residence before.

7:24Mariana had been aware of some work that I'd written before and had used a short story from a book called The Mechanical Coppola that I'd written as a kind of a curatorial crucible, I guess, for one, one sort of quarter of the triennial. And it seemed logical, I guess, to both of us for me to write, to be present in the triennial and kind of write back in, write into it, as well as kind of sort of, you know, be present in it. And I had been writer in residence before in other places, such as the Whitechapel Gallery in London and Cadist Art Foundation in Paris.

8:00And I guess what's at stake within being a writer in residence in somewhere that's public is, you know, what does a writer do? You know, how do you see what a writer does? Mainly writers are obviously just sitting alone by themselves quite happily, you know, not having to talk to anybody, staring at a blank page and biting their nails. And so, so being a writer in residence in public spaces is interesting because it does challenge, it challenges the writer to work out how visible or non-visible you want to be.

8:33And often that just literally has to do with timing and access to the building. So I spent a couple of months over two different time periods in one of the triennial sites, Palazio Pombal, which is quite central. And it's a sort of semi-derelict palazio that was built around 1670. And it largely survived the kind of giant earthquake that happened in Lisbon, which, of course, sort of had very interesting implications for grid systems and kind of the way cities are organized.

9:12And the person who did that was actually Pombal, who happened to own the palazio through kind of inheriting it. So the palazio was abandoned. I went before the triennial happened, spent a month in it with a kind of long key, accessing it every day, went very early in the mornings because it was quite hot. I am interested in durational writing in situ. It's something that I do quite often. Part of the reason why I like doing it is because it kind of forces me to write.

9:45So I, you know, I make a rule ostensibly for myself and I can't leave until I've kind of, you know, done my bit for the day. And then I returned to the space again later and wrote kind of through and with the space rather than about the space. So the book really is, the book has an ambient feel about it, I would say, and has a sort of an idea of being really saturated in the space. So it's not an historical account of the space.

10:18It's not an architectural account of the space, but it does, in a sense, make account for the materiality of the space through this durational engagement with it. I guess it's maybe interesting to say that, you know, legend, which is in the title, there are also six legends that form the basic structure for the book. And obviously, legend is this kind of, you know, interesting word, both in terms of how we might think about it on a map, but also just as a, yeah, as a space to, as a space of projection and speculation.

10:58Very interesting.

The method of durational writing

10:59I like this idea of durational writing. Yeah. What distinguishes durational writing from writing? Just staying there. I know.

11:11Yes. I mean, obviously, you know, all activities have a durational aspect to them. I guess with thinking about it in this context, there's a very deliberate intent in the duration and sort of an intent in abiding, let's say, within, for example, a space or, for example, with a particular work. So, I was invited to be a visiting professor at Cambridge recently and did some work in Kettle's Yard, which I'm sure you'll know Kettle's Yard very well, a very particular, a beautiful and odd space stroke museum.

11:56And I worked with a single work by an artist called Gillian and I worked there for a week, sorry, for two weeks, actually, and wrote through it. So, it's the same sort of basic principle of abiding in a space with a particular intent. And I guess the intent is partially one of a sort of wonky capture of something with a method of noticing, I suppose, like an accelerated noticing. So, I mean, in one sense, duration doesn't mean anything in that everything has a certain duration to it.

12:34But I guess in relation to durational writing in situ, such as the sort of activity that took place with this work, it does really, it forefronts a kind of an intention to notice and to keep noticing. And also just to stay, like literally just to kind of stay put. It's a very nice idea and I find it very rewarding to think about that. I was talking with my wife a couple of days ago about what it would take for me to be able to write and I said, to use Virginia Woolf, a room of my own.

13:09And it seems to me that in this process and in these site writings that you do, this durational writing that you do, it's about creating a room that you, in a way, like a hired pen, you're brought in to manufacture the room out of the conditions that you're given. Is that a fair way of describing it? Yeah, it's funny you evoking the term room of one's own. I guess what I'm always looking for is someone else's room. You know, I have a perfectly nice room to write in now, which I try to escape from at any kind of, you know, any available opportunity.

13:44So maybe rather than a sense, maybe rather than a sense of creating a room, I mean, I am sort of slightly serious about taking someone else's room, you know, like inhabiting someone else's room, literal, literal, a literal space. But I suppose there is something about the roominess, if I can put it like that, of the roominess of borrowed time vis-a-vis doing something like being resident in a particular place.

14:25Because one is borrowing it out of your own time, and for us who have full-time jobs, we're always borrowing our own time, in a sense, for different sorts of activities. That are obviously, I teach full-time and have done for many years, so that time, that residency time is not necessarily built in to the teaching time, let's say, or indeed into the research time. So in that sense, it's borrowed, and borrowed time has a certain, you know, time limit on it, as well as a sort of interesting illicit sense to it, which is, you know, sort of ambient illicit.

15:08So I think with, I think with this type of writing that's in this particular book, there is a sense of allowing the roominess of being away from one's own room, actually, of being disconcerned, just made that word up, but you know what I mean, disconcerned, and perhaps, yes, disconcerted, by the oddness of another place, and I think there are moments in this book where that kind of being disconcerted by the oddness of it, or the mice in it, or the dirt in it, etc., is a counterpoint to this sort of method of durational work, where I must stay, despite wanting to go.

16:04Especially when it's really hot in Lisbon. Yes, it's boiling. Again, I like this idea. It's an idea of sort of making strange, isn't it? There's almost something of the, well, as you say, the performance art has got something of the jester about it, that you are pulled into an environment to transform it through your presence, to make it strange to the people who have become habituated to it, so that they can see it anew. Yes.

16:35Brilliant. We're done here.

16:40No, but I think that might be a nice juncture to have you read some of the book to begin with. Would you tell us a little bit about what you're going to read? Yeah, so there are, the book is loosely structured around six legends of varying lengths.

17:01They are very much obviously situated in a space, and sometimes they reflect upon a particular presence in the space, an actual physical presence. So the piece that I'll read for you, Legend of Bronze Bell, is actually an actual bronze bell in the actual space. And I guess it's interesting to maybe think about with this piece, what sits behind, in a sense, the bronze bell, and what might speculatively make it ring historically.

17:46Fantastic. Read away.

Reading Legend of Bronze Bell

17:48Legend of Bronze Bell.

18:18All Saints Day, no hand needed to agitate the call.

18:24Bell knows that when it rings, servants gather smartly to receive instruction from Master. But before this happens, what servants need to hear in order to be summoned is, of course, the ringing of Bell.

18:41Bell feels that what it has to say has precedence over all subsequent missives. For without the tough lick of clapper on bronze, there is no gathering of servants, and Master is instructing only himself. Beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you. I like this idea in this piece of the way that you use writing. To a certain extent, what I put in my notes to you as a designerly practice, that the writing itself constitutes not just a response to a physical condition,

19:27but in a way gives agency in the same way that an architect, for example, or a designer gives agency to materials, or activates the agency of materials, perhaps. One is thinking about it in those terms.

The bell and seismic history

19:41What was the meta-narrative, as you spoke of before, behind this engagement with this bell specifically? Was it the first thing you encountered that kind of spoke to you? Firstly, to respond to what you've just said, I really like that idea, and I like the idea that writing is, in this instance, the physical condition. So, more generally, that may be a physical condition, rather than a representation or an ode to a physical condition.

20:15I like the idea of the materiality of the writing being the physical condition. So, I spent some time in the space, not writing, obviously, walking around, you know, finding, looking at things, you know, climbing things, to walk, you know, getting on chairs, looking at stuff. And the bell, the bell's not big, but the bell is near the servants' quarters, so obviously used to summon the servants.

20:47And actually, the Palazzo itself is not, it's not, it's not massive. I mean, it's, you know, it's big-ish. It's not absolutely gigantic. And it's, it's made of amplifying materials, i.e. marble. So, I rang the bell, and you can hear the bell throughout the whole Palazzo, all different floors of it. Which struck me as interesting, given that it's not a big bell, and that it's, you know, a three-story, ostensibly three-story Palazzo, as I say. Not massive, but not wee either.

21:17Bigger than most houses, obviously.

21:21So, I like the presence of the bell. I like the kind of material condition of, of the bell, and that, just actually the functionality of, the extreme functionality of the bell. Very, very efficient. I, obviously, had done some research before I went, and had been very interested in the great Lisbon earthquake that was massive, and destroyed most of the city. And it happened on All Saints Day, which obviously has a very kind of poetic notion to it, of death, etc.

21:58And I like the idea of the bell ringing by the hand of the earthquake and of the tremors, rather than by the hand of the master or the, you know, persons looking after the kitchen, etc. So, I like this idea of the bell being rung by history, and being rung by a kind of seismic, a seismic shift.

22:28The owner of the Palazzo, Pombal, was instrumental in rebuilding Lisbon, and instrumental in organizing the delivery of the building into a grid system. And was also instrumental in ensuring that much of it was built with anti-seismic construction. So, very interesting, very kind of interesting character. That's a very problematic character, but a very interesting character as well.

23:01So, the bell, the bell, ultimately, in this piece of writing, is only itself. It doesn't stand in for something else. And it is also an actor in history, and is an efficient way of summoning many, many servants who help Master's Hand. I do hope we get to talk about the idea of the aesthetics of your language as well, or the language and the words, the written word as an aesthetic device as well.

23:35Because, obviously, in that short section you just read, there is a clear aesthetic intent to construct words into something, I guess, that feels, that provides an aesthetic response. Maybe we can come on to that. I wonder if you'd like to read the next part of the legend of Bronzebell that we started with. I read a little section that refers somewhat to the material emotion of history.

24:05The tone of this is a little different than the last one.

Reading the second excerpt

24:10Naturally, Palazzo Pombal has forgotten more than it has remembered. While such intimate physical traces of this history, breath, perspiration, skin flakes, clothes fibres, and so on, attach to, and often attack, the actual historical fabric of this building, the Palazzo retaliates by forgetting much that it once knew. This is entirely necessary for its own survival, or protection from professional conservation.

24:48The Palazzo must not remember too much, for that which is remembered could be extracted by such conservation. The Palazzo prefers amateurs, because it wishes to conserve only itself. This the Palazzo does by choosing for itself that which it will remember, and, of course, that which it will neglect to remember. By constructing its own memoir, the Palazzo retains integral, internal history.

25:22The Palazzo chooses to forget those who have done it harm, those who have forced amendments, insertions, modifications, and additions to its fabric. Who have gouged fragile frescoes, who have chipped ornament, who have prized off tiling, those who have stolen, who have taken too much, who have inserted thin spit walls to unbalance its material logic, who have facilitated the accommodation of more and more people,

25:54and more people who will, in turn, harm their host. Again, very beautiful, but, as you say, a very different tone to the piece you read before.

The stance of the amateur

26:03And I think it's a really, for me, it's a really interesting excerpt, because it adopts a kind of critical position, particularly in relation to this notion of rebuilding. And you've mentioned the rebuilder of Lisbon itself. You seem to have developed a very kind of emotive relationship to this building, almost as a reciprocating entity. Is that what this durational engagement enables? I would say that it is not an emotional relationship with the building.

26:33I would say that it's a critical relationship with the building. There are elements of emotion in the book that pertain to the death of a friend,

26:48which happen in the real time of the durational writing. I think the use of the durational writing has more to do with a refinement of a critical position, but importantly, a sort of position of the amateur, which I mentioned in that little excerpt that I read out.

27:21I think the role of the amateur is interesting in regards to this work. It's something that I'm interested in generally in work, because it's a kind of anti-environmental position, the amateur, let's say. And by anti-environmental, I mean the professional environment. So it brings with it elements of the auto-textual and of lived experience and, of course, of research.

27:58But I think really importantly as a writer, it's very important to forget, albeit temporarily forget, much of what one has researched in order to be able to carry out the actual writing. So the editorial process with a work such as this, obviously, as with all writing and all kind of endeavours, happens after you've created the actual material, and then that's when you begin to remember the things

28:33that you have necessarily forgotten in order to carry out the durational writing. So there's a weird sort of relationship of one's own memory with the research that happens in the place and a weird kind of intertwining or compression of one's own memory between the period of being working durationally and then obviously coming back to edit the piece.

29:03So, for instance, the main meat, let's say, of this, well, the words mainly were written in 2013 and the book came out in 2017. Obviously, I didn't spend four years in between editing. I was doing lots of other things at the same time. But, you know, there's time and there's time in between that in terms of going back and editing it. So it's a long way, Ambrose, of, I guess, addressing your question that I would say that it's, in a sense, when I say the material emotion of history, I think that I'm referring there not to my own emotion within it.

29:42There is a tone in that excerpt that I read out that's a bit judgy. I think that there is something in that of trying to adapt and cohere to how the material of the building would feel rather than how I feel about the material of the building. But obviously, it's not using the same voice as in the first piece that I read,

30:15which is ostensibly assuming the voice of the material itself. So the voice in that bit is close to the material itself, but also it's making a boundary between the material and a speculation on what the material might think. So there are lots of extraction, contractions. There are lots of contractions and kind of movements around scale and proximity across the book.

30:51And with that, obviously, that's deliberate. And with that, there's a sense of, you know, when you're really trying to scrutinize something and let you go in and you're really trying to look at it really, really closely. And then you realize you can't really see it unless you come back out to see the whole thing as a whole piece. So it creates, I guess, on a technical level, it creates a pace across the book as well. If one's writing a book of this nature, it doesn't really have a plot, you know.

31:22So we need to rely on pace.

31:28In this process of reflecting on the building in this way, did you come to consider, so this is a very architect-y question, you're going to do it anyway. Did you come to sort of, I guess, frame a sort of way of thinking about the life of buildings? Because the building here, even in this case, which is, as you say, more stepped back, more objectifying in a kind of way, there's still this sense that the building is somehow subject to and perhaps even victim of human action.

31:58When I was at the Glasgow School of Art and I saw the building burned out, the emotional response of the city and of Scottish people, of people all over the world, including Brad Pitt, was directly related to the idea that the building itself had feelings or had tender feelings, and then the responses to ideas of reconstructing it and the absolute necessity of putting it back in one piece as it was. This idea then that conservation as framed or adaptive reuse

32:33or the way that we interact with historic and cultural fabric, it sort of somehow has kind of a deep moral and ethical positionality and there's a sort of obligation. It's sort of like if one's loved one was to get injured in a car accident, you wouldn't say, well, that's them now. You'd kind of stitch them back together. Simply put, did it change the way that you thought about our relationship to historic and cultural fabric? I don't know. The honest answer. I'm reflecting on the phrase, I think I heard it correctly,

33:06is it adaptive reuse or is it adapted or adaptive? Adaptive. Yeah, yeah. There's whole books on the darn thing. Yeah. I'm thinking of adaptive reuse and I'm also thinking about laterally, you were saying if someone gets, you know, knocked down, you kind of, you know, whatever, let's say they lose a limb, for example, putting them back, you know, putting them back together type scenario. But I'm also then thinking about, you know, do not resuscitate.

33:41Which is, you know, obviously the prerogative of the individual to decide that in the UK, certainly, that they do not want resuscitated, you know, and one would have that kind of conversation. I had the conversation with my own mother before she died. And so I don't have a firm opinion on it and would not presume to have a firm opinion on it because it's not my business, if I can put it that way.

34:15I guess that with this particular building, some of the observations in the wee bit that I just read and that wee extract have to do with flimsy amendments,

34:33flimsy built walls that, you know, reduce the space actually rather than making it bigger, bits of, you know, bits of gaffer tape, bits of this, bits of that, you know, of which actually in that building there aren't a huge amount because the building is largely derelict at that time when I was working in it, the building was largely derelict. I actually haven't revisited the building since then, so it might well be very different. So I think my interest in evoking the phrase conservation,

35:05you know, or the idea of conservation in relation to this text is a reflection upon the uses of the amateur in terms of how one experiences it rather than the use of the professional conservator in terms of how one experiences it. I like the sense of adaptive, I like that as an idea. I like the idea of adaptive as analogous possibly to durational

35:39in terms of carrying stuff out and it being ongoing. And I also, it's something I think about in other works and in terms of developing voice in other works is how one may evoke a sense of a continuous present tenseness that things are in a state, ourselves included, of continuous erosion, but there's an interesting potential in the continuous erosion of just kind of, you know, keeping going on and on.

36:11There is something zombie-ish about that, which is rather appealing, I think, to a certain extent. I haven't came and would presume to come to a definite conclusion on that. I do like the comparison to our own bodies' ageing and the flimsy amendments we make to them to try and stop us bloody falling over. Would you like to read the next piece? So this is another short extract. I think the tone of this is not dissimilar to the extract that I read previously.

36:43It's not one of the legend pieces like the one I began with, Legend of Bronze Bell. And this one is concerned with a specific material, stucco, and the idea of compassion. And maybe, yes, it's useful to say that I mentioned it a wee bit earlier, that during the period of the residency, a very good friend died totally unexpectedly,

37:16almost in a sense like she was, you know, excised or extinguished. And obviously it was a very upsetting and it further made me not want to be in the space. So the sorrow and the beginnings of grief in that wafted through some elements of the writing, and this is one of them.

Reading Legend of Girth

37:46Compassion is a curious and essential human quality, mercifully embodied in friendship. I believe those without compassion may never have meaningful relationships, that they'll always be left out, wondering why others do what they do and how it is they actually do it. Without compassion, there can only be envy as a response to achievement. Without compassion, there can only be greed.

38:17Without compassion, there is only the savage requisition of knowledge, not as a treasure to be shared.

38:25Those without compassion are forever looking over their shoulders to see how far they are in front of the other, not seeking to lend a hand to those who have fallen behind. Without compassion, there can be no grace. Undisturbed ancient stucco survives intact in underground tombs, catacombs and grottos, hence the term grotesque to describe this very particular type of decorative motif, where crisp bladed figures and hard foliage entwine.

38:56Rokai as a stucco style furthers this aim, fashioning formal acceptance of unity through asymmetry, by presenting irregular cleft shells and ragged S-form waves to contextualise and harmonise the central allegory, matching relief ornament to three-dimensional object.

39:20Death, at least, preserves the abstract.

39:24Fascinating. Tell me a little bit about this tension between these two paragraphs and perhaps this turning phrase at the end. Hmm. Why stucco? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of stucco in the building.

39:41You know, and there's a lot of stucco particularly in the hallways, the ceiling hallways, unsurprisingly, obviously, but, you know, there was a lot, there's quite a lot of it. So there's a lot to kind of look upward, heavenly at with a stucco. One's eye is drawn up to heaven.

40:01I'm very interested in the uses of the abstract and the experimental in writing. And I'm interested in how one develops an accurate and precise voice in writing that may be experimental or expanded or abstract, but does not do so in order to be imprecise

40:33or in order to sidestep precision precision or exactness.

40:42So compassion is obviously something that in the first bit of what I spoke about, I think very obviously it just in terms of the way they've written it is is thinking about compassion and friendship and and the kind of the utility of compassion as a way, I guess, of being in the world and of understanding of kind of knowledge of the world and of attempting to and attempting

41:13yeah, attempting to make sense of of stuff, I guess, around us. And I I honestly believe that compassion is a very I mean, it's mercurial and I and it's essential human quality can see it in many aspects of kind of real life outside of writing life, let's say, you know, where it's totally necessary.

41:39As a writerly technique or something that's evoked as a evoked within a moment of writing, there is this relationship of in this book of of being very compassionate or seeking to be compassionate with the building and the materials of the building itself and that's perhaps more obvious in the previous piece that I've written. So with the putting these two bits together

42:09and of course these are just a small extract from a larger piece, I wanted to create a tension hopefully a useful and interesting tension between the relative sort of crisp bladed figures as I put it and hard foliage so this kind of crispness and stucco can often appear bladed I think when you look at it often has that sort of sense of being bladed with

42:40something which creates a motif or a system of harmonisation which is then interrupted by the realisation of something that comes through compassion so my father I'm half Italian my father worked as many Italians did in terrazzo

43:11and marble he polished terrazzo and marble in churches and in schools etc many Italians in Northern Ireland and Scotland did that did that work so he often came home you know with the parts of the materials that he'd been working with in his skin in his nose in his ears in his eyes often you know that's very common with that type of work so for me

43:41from a very young age I have a very kind of intimate relationship with kind of residue of materials on bodies and in this I'm trying to examine that but at a distance through the formality of the stucco that's high and can't be seen properly and with the sense of loss of what is loss of friendship and compassion

44:11with a friendship and also I guess loss of visibility of what you can only see because you're too far away from it so you're only really getting a very kind of basic idea of outline and shape not of the actual particularities of the material itself I do like this idea of the notion of compassion a description of compassion and this compassion that you show to the building and again I keep coming back to this idea that you present the building as an active participant

44:42in the kind of life of the people that live within it and the first section that you read this idea of the bell being rung and the servants coming to that this idea of a kind of reciprocity a kind of reciprocal relationship but in the piece that you just read it seems to me the compassion and there's a kind of an emotional reciprocity that you're trying to articulate about one's obligation to the building through this process but asking I guess the broader public or asking others

45:13to sort of encounter it and be present with it so that they can develop this kind of compassionate relationship too which is rather elegant would you like to read another part so I will now read another one of the six legends in the book this one is called legend of girth I resume my perception of space is not two-dimensional

45:44I cannot read this it makes no sense the architect has spread his plan flush across the tiny area of my total surface I feel the heel of his hand evenly pressing down on brittle tracing paper applying firm light pressure to smooth it in all directions the tips of his four fingers and two thumbs support his bodily weight behind holding the tracing paper square steady at such an unnatural angle the plan

46:16hugs me flatly tries to communicate it's ink schematic seeping somewhat the architect's plan is describing intimate detail touch cross projections lines interconnecting at more or less right angles their depth pace to depict the relative thickness of the palazio's interior walls human stride rationalised in millimetres doorways where they ought not to be windows looking black

46:46pomboline sills a useful legend and they are just there look the evidence of a quivering nib i can't keep up this architect's plan is describing me surely the enterprise is a sin of pride demonstrating entrenched planes and suffocating corners which expand and contract in search of their term animus i peer at folly i imagine

47:17but i've no means of being sure thick lines are thick walls or old walls many hands slowly 17th century fortification heat cold i regulate such factors in the palazio with the aid of girth thin lines are thin walls or new walls many hands swiftly 19th century subdividing by erecting further me extra chambers were crafted flimsy by comparison perhaps smaller

47:47certainly but doubling the space here all the same this more of me is counter intuitive this more of me adds space not reduces it where do all the materials use to create this space to make more of me go by redoubling the material and repeating the composition of my form the palazio grows yet the importance of the architect's plan is marginal it means little as an actual document for what

48:18does it in fact show nothing of significance now i'll tell you a story there is an element that dwells within me he is left behind he hums when he is happy he cries when he is sad i've never heard him hum he arrived on the final dearth day of the 1912 strike he wore no shoes so at first i didn't hear him entering he slept deeply the year ended

48:48he awakened keen sharp with hunger he cried he cried he slept deeply he awakened weak blown and pale he cried he cried he slept deeply he awakened cold chewed mortar supped sand his teeth ground a slurred song his eyes leaped saturating my surface he's not in memory if the

49:19architect now drew by hand a small human skilled figure tracking their progress as they move through the ground floor first floor second floor of the palazio walking through the corridors and entering the rooms which I form I would not know where I was on the plan I would be the one who is lost fantastic

Mice and non-human agency

49:43and beautiful and you return to Ireland does that ghost haunt much of what you write no that little ghost is just in the palazio but there is a there's a couple of things I wanted to come to with this one is the way that you use your body as a register as a sort of a type of history writing where you kind of in a way it's

50:14sort of like an archaeology of the present kind of piecing together materials and perceptions and trying to stitch a picture together is that an intended approach yeah you sort of stuck with yourself I mean in buildings of this nature they are very dusty they are you know smelly they are there's lots of insects there's

50:45lots of mice there's rats there's lots of things floating about the heat heats the you know heats dust up you smell it in a particular way you can't lean on stuff because the stuff will come off onto you you'll have damaged the building inadvertently you can't touch things because the bit might well fall off in your hand you know then you'll have damaged the building then you may get shouted out if someone finds out they've done so something

51:17I think about a lot and that I speak with my writing students about is how we gather sense data past what we see through the writing process and how the sense data I've made that phrase up but I hope you know what I mean how the sense data is imperative to the reader to locate the reader and to give the reader I guess evidence of some sort of authenticity of some sort and yes of kind

51:54of realness of some sort so it's obviously concrete if you will in that sense and the sense data is often more challenging to write in a way that's not descriptive and often most interesting for me when I'm working with it to really again go back to a very sort of strong sense of kind of you know of deep abstraction with it

52:25that that it's really that one is really supping supping it that it's it's um you're you're you're absorbing it and I guess it goes back a little bit to where our conversation began excuse me um I guess it goes back to where our conversation began around um you know a room and roominess and borrowing of borrowing of a space so um I also happen to have very bad eczema

52:59um which uh as a skin disease obviously is you know itchy unpleasant and um makes one very sensitive to atmospheric conditions in a very practical way and um and I think that I guess that it's a as we all have our own particularities and peculiarities physical and otherwise having a skin disease which means that that bits of your body are kind of very susceptible to

53:33heat dust etc and itchiness does directly inform the way in which that I would be present in the space and be able to understand the space through physical sensation another section of your book you talk about a mouse page 62 I think it is yeah and I think what's interesting here is from what I understand this is quite an early example of what's now become quite mainstream in particularly architectural scholarship which is to start to look at the

54:09the non-human the non-human the agency of the non-human and the interactivity between that is there a way a sense in what you're doing in this particular piece of writing an attempt to blur the boundaries between where the human stops and the building starts and I guess in the you've mentioned the dustiness transferring to your body and you've mentioned your eczema which is the building's atmosphere transferring to your body there's a kind of

54:39elegance to that I think it's kind of an interesting one where you were aware kind of where you informed in that way by a kind of idea to disentangle the architecture and it comes to something I've been thinking as you've been reading these pieces and talking throughout which is that the whole process seems to be about moving away from abstraction and you're mentioning of the architect as this kind of abstract figure and the meaninglessness in a way of the architectural drawings the way that architectural drawings communicate strange things that are not then present in real life or

55:13in the experience the sensory experience of space so I guess that's a whole bundle of ideas and questions there if you want to kind of trudge around in that feel free the mouse I like the mouse I mean I I'm afraid of mice you know a little I mean there are things I'm more afraid of uh the mice but I don't particularly like mice and there were a lot of mice in the building obviously um and the building belongs to the mice and to the you know the weevils and the various other insects

55:46it doesn't belong to the owner of the building it certainly doesn't belong to me as the tenant temporary tenant of the building um the more than human aspect um and the sort of attendant work around it object-oriented ontology etc which is is seems very far away and old at this stage now um in scholarship perhaps but in practice yeah yeah I mean we one can't imagine despite despite

56:18like best efforts and interest it's very difficult to imagine what the mouse thinks of me isn't it you know um but part of what does interest me about what the mouse thinks of me or not really what the mouse thinks of me but what the mouse does is that the is that the mouse is is busier than I am you know um and that all of the other little creatures in there are more infinitely busy than I am despite me being you know focused and intent on

56:51a kind of you know very very focused and very intent on a very kind of relatively intensive experience so I'm doing some work I've been doing some work for a while around medieval anchorites um who as you will know um mainly got walled into of their own shoes and got walled into cells usually um usually attached to churches not exclusively predominantly women julian of norwich being the most famous uh in the uk um and internationally um very interesting writer and I've gone and worked in

57:30I've worked in julian cell which is actually a reconstruction of the original cell but apparently it's identical but you know who knows but I've worked I've worked in the cell and it's more challenging to I guess in some ways approach understanding the medieval mind the human medieval mind than the mouse than the mouse mind so I suppose with that um I think there is definitely something to be gained and I think it probably links a little

58:05bit with what we're talking about earlier with the sense of compassion of a of a of a radical compassion in a sense not you know a radical as in you know you're really deep diving you're deep diving into it and spent a lot of time in it with the understanding that you know that um you you're always you're always quite far away from it and you'll never be able to really truly access it literally with the mouse I like the idea that the mouse and other creatures like the mouse

58:40have their own way of using the house physically the palazio rather physically that um it's not that only they can do and that they you know that that that that cannot be accessed by anyone else I mean Kafka writes very well obviously about little creatures using stuff and you know ultimately kind of getting lost in their own burrows that they've made for themselves sort of thing

Paring down the language

59:06um I guess within that something that that that reoccurs to me a lot is I am interested generally in in working and stylistically stylistically and conceptually in writing in an eye in the idea of complexity I'm not interested in the idea of like um complication so I purr and purr back stylistically till I get to a point where there's there's very little left

59:39deliberately and I'm concerned with what I can take away to like what the least that I can you know what the least I can um do or what the least I can have is what's what's the least I can get away with put it that way do you know like stylistically stylistically in the work and the mouse the mouse is is an interesting figure in that because the mouse also does with very little but also finds its own its own way to navigate a large palacio knowing that the big footsteps that

1:00:16are that are going around will go the mouse knows that it will stay so the mouse wins everybody else passes through mice are the winners I'm not sure that directly addresses your question but I think it moves um it moves between the many ideas in a mouse-like way yeah that you evoked I want to finish on one last question I very much like the way that you've written this book and

1:00:46and I love this idea of paring down the the language it's a misian idea isn't it I you know mises less is more the older I get the more I think about it the more I realize it's probably true you know it's Occam's razor essentially but I'm interested in your your approach to aesthetic practices as well as alternative ways of knowing things where do you think this knowledge resides and how do we how might we as disciples of Maria Fusco how might we approach this how do we start

1:01:23what do we dig into before I answer that can you explain what you mean by aesthetic practices well the writing itself I mean the very idea that you would pare down your writing means that to me or implies to me that you have an intention to convey a certain aesthetic experience to your reader that although you of course you can't know other minds let alone mice minds you can't even know other human minds there is an attempt by you as the artist can in some way coordinate or curate

1:01:58the aesthetic experience of those people who are writing it you pick certain words you cut certain words out you settle on certain ideas and metaphors to a certain extent the work remains very sparse the writing is very sparse dare I say it in a Hemingway like way a reduction in adjectives and so on I always think adjectives are really interesting because although they are precise they create precision simply by their diffusion they create incoherence so you're quite clearly trying to

1:02:34cultivate a range of aesthetic experiences for your readers that are not these experiences but these experiences I mean I can refer again to the sense of paring back so you're only left with what you actually need in my mind which is a style and an aesthetic choice and is underpinned with

1:03:06a priority from my point of view of taking everything else away so that only what's totally necessary the necessary dreamer if you will is what is left like literally that's what is on the page I also have a feeling that the sparseness can provide a lot of space for folk to move about in

1:03:38the less stuff that's in a room the easier you can move around the room there's not lots of stuff that you have to climb over or climb under you know there's no big wardrobes you can go and kind of you know sit in whatever hiding so I do like I am interested and wish to give the reader or indeed the audience if I'm making a performance work a lot of space and like to create a lot of breath and space in the work

1:04:12I am from a very economically poor family and I think as with most other people who I've met who are creatives generally from economically poor backgrounds we're very concerned with things you know and not having things and perhaps also many of us not wanting a lot of things

1:04:42so and I've written I've written a book actually of essays around working classness as method I think perhaps only I can see this but in a work like this I think there is something of that in writing this work in the sparseness of it and not throwing a lot of stuff at it um I have been called a genre which I'm not sure what to make of that because obviously whilst I'm carefully spending a lot of time

1:05:22crafting the work and thinking about the language and thinking about the form the work does always come before us and we're always we're always ending up following our own work so there is an element of uncertainty and also simultaneously extreme certainty within that that I guess is genre or style to do with an individual and what one's individual preferences are

1:05:54if someone was wanting to get into the kind of practice that you do what would be a good exercise sit somewhere for ages and don't move and do that over and over again until you have at least 5000 words that's that's some good teacher right there thank you ever so much maria it was lovely to hear you read and to talk about your book thank you ambos

1:06:24i think with my eyes and my ears and my hands and feet and nostrils and mouth a bit of the herdsman by portuguese poet fernando persoa which i'm thumbing in here for good measure see the podcast description for links to maria and the book also because you are good people links to ways you might support the podcast and thanks for listening thank you you you