(Un)doing Thresholds

Door/ways to new Neapolitan Practices

Animate Drawing

Andrew Benjamin described Naples as ‘a porous city’. A city where spaces overlap, boundaries are cancelled, and architecture is overwritten. However, how can one capture the conditions of a non-static city?

The Animate Drawing aims to read and record the porous conditions of Naples. Through the act of ‘(un)doing’, materials, spaces and functions are surveyed and drawn onto timber doors constantly recreating a series of recordings of the Sicilian city. We decided to call these overlapping drawings “thresholds”; i.e., spaces in-between spaces.

© Joseph Coulter, Eirini Makarouni, Katerina Saranti & Katy Sidwell

Graeme Gilloch took Walter Benjamin’s description of Naples a step further. He argued that the reason why Naples is a porous city is because it is made up of ruins (places of memory) labyrinths (places of dislocation) and theatres (places of performance). Following Gilloch’s readings, we assigned each of these terms a material and a color, gradually constructing our own reading of the city through the making of the Animate Drawing.

• Black is ruin,
  
• Grey is labyrinth,
• White is theatre and
• Red is threshold - where the other three overlap.