Elusive Construction

ELUSIVE CONSTRUCTION
Elusive Construction investigates the uncertain power of fire in relation to architecture through the mystery of the Ephesian Artemis and the site of the stove built on the Arkhe campus.
 
Interested in working with the specific location, our group located our research on the goddess of Artemis, the main deity of the region during antiquity. The Ephesian Artemis and her cult were a mysterious aspect of the life at Ephesus that evaded representations. The Temple of Artemis equally served a multitude of functions in antiquity.
 
Elusive Construction asks what it means to build from manipulated ruins, and reconstruct a historically elusive space, and archive a myth that still evades representation and interpretation.
 
The project is comprised of two parts. Part I is the material ornamentation of the stove through the multiplication of arrowheads. Part II is the immaterial projection onto and within the stove through the multiplication of column drums. In both parts, our group performed artisanal multiplications that still bore imprints of individual style.
 
Part I utilizes the object of the arrowhead as a mirroring symbol of fire. Across civilizations, arrows were historically used both for hunting and for war, capable of both construction and destruction. The expression of the arrowhead lies in a liminal space until the moment a human picks up the arrow and directs it towards another living being.
 
Part II focuses on the Temple of Artemis (Artemision) at Ephesus as a psychogeographical site of the construction and destruction of memory. The architecture of Artemision was flooded, set on fire, plundered, destroyed, forgotten during the first millenium, before it was rediscovered, excavated, raided, reconstructed again in the 19th and 20th centuries. The current archaeological site of the temple is a manipulated field of stone foundations, with one symbolically constructed column stacked with various broken pieces and two concrete blocks. We took the 3D model of an Artemision column drum from the British Museum’s Sketchfab page and manually gave the column digital glitches in Blender. These drums were taken into a virtual landscape, where they self-organize into spatial formations before they fall again.
 
Together, Parts I and II explore the dualist power of fire through multiplications with individual characteristics. Ephesian Artemis (the goddess), Artemision (the architecture), arrowheads (the object), and fire (the chemical reaction), all bear a similar quality of evasiveness, harnessing their power in holding a vast liminal space at once malleable to and indestructible from interpretations and representations. The physical arrowheads and immaterial projections activate the stove as a temporary temple of fire. The complex psycho-spatial architecture of Artemis(ion) experiences an elusive repetition of construction around the domestic fire.