Fictive pursuits

Over four months, the Santozeum will be hosting artists in residence.  Collaborations on island projects will yield publications.  Projects work in twos – collaborators, ideas, dialogues.  A multivalent forum emerges from the dual strands.  The idea may be construed as obsolete today, but the Santozeum believes in the arcane, the slow and focused thought.  Robert Gutman, a standard bearer of the urbanistic architectural field and an enormously influential educator for me and many, coined the dialogic practice in architecture “The Romantic Loner,” in that “there is a powerful image in the profession which encourages the architect to think of himself as a free, independent practitioner, operating more or less on his own, and cultivating personal relationships with an understanding and appreciative client.  The source of the image is a romanticized view of the architect-patron relationship that is supposed to have prevailed before the nineteenth century” (In Architecture from the Outside In, 37).  Gutman relegates the practice mostly to the past.  A redefinition of the productive quality of working in twos is not hierarchical.  The Santozeum is a patron in that it is a host with a mission.  The residencies take place on Santorini, therefore must refer to their ambient.  In that sense, the fiction of any artistic pursuit must reference the dual existence of space and maker.