Projection spaces

I. Inside — Outside: Duality

Architecture is the art of spatial arrangement.

It shapes emptiness through fullness.

In architecture, one learns to work with the full — to ensure it is stable, lasting, expressive, neutral, often watertight, protecting us from our environment (water, air, heat, cold...).

The space of the home — a private space — is a fullness that contains us, and it is within it that we live. Urban space — a public space — is an emptiness through which we move. Public space lies outside our private space — the interior.

​

Speaking of space and spatiality inevitably echoes our body and its place in the world. On one hand, because it is through the body that spatial experience occurs, and on the other, because the human being has an intimate experience of interiority and exteriority.

​

There is the inner experience of our body — physiological (I feel my heart beating, blood pulsing through my veins, my stomach growling…), psychological (thoughts and emotions). The experience of our body as an organic whole with defined limits has, as a corollary, an exteriority. It is worth noting that this inside/outside duality is not innate; it develops roughly during the first 18 months of life. (This is a crucial point: our relationship to the world is acquired!)

​

To what extent is leaving our home not also leaving ourselves?

To what extent does welcoming someone into our home involve opening ourselves?

​

We inhabit, and are inhabited ourselves.

A semantic shift begins to take place here.

A shift that leads us from architecture — the art of building — to psychology. Psychology is the discipline that deals with our inner spaces.

The purpose of this talk is to explore the connections between the spaces we contain — our inner spaces — and the spaces that contain us, the so-called exterior spaces.

 

​

II. Inside — Outside: Resonance 

The relationship between built spaces and our inner spaces has been explored by various disciplines: architecture, of course, but also anthropology, philosophy (I am thinking of the work of Gaston Bachelard), and psychoanalysis, particularly through the analysis of dreams.

​

Dreaming of an apartment, of a house, is to project an image of the self (the person). The cellar, the attic, the living room, the kitchen, the study — all these rooms express an inner dynamic or instance.

​

The cellar speaks to us of the unconscious.
The attic, of the conscious, the rational — the mental space.
The kitchen is the place of transformation.
The study, a place of purification (therapists receive people in their cabinets).
Dreaming of discovering a new room in your house may suggest the revelation of new resources, a new part of yourself.

Etc.

The spaces we encounter in dreams are symbolic spaces. What does this mean? It means that dreamed spaces appear not as what they are, but as what they re-present. What can they represent? An infinite number of things — this is a core feature of symbols: they are semantically inexhaustible. However, this infinity has certain limits — namely, the experiences and inner structure of the dreamer, and those of their species. Every symbolic space — as with every dream form — is a revealer; it is an outstretched hand toward an elsewhere. Every symbol has a reverse side, a hidden face. This is another feature of the symbol: its capacity to speak without speaking, to show without blinding.

​

Etymologically, the word symbol comes from the Greek sumbolon, meaning “sign of recognition,” derived from sumballein, “to throw together, to join, to unite.” A symbol is a bridge that links the unconscious to the conscious — and more broadly, any value to its counter-value.

​

Why am I talking to you about dreams?

Because what takes place in the depths of our nights may not be so different from what plays out in the fullness of our days.

​

Georges Romey, a French engineer and psychotherapist who theorized the technique of free waking dream, explains that there are two ways of apprehending what we call reality: a conscious path, which focuses on things as objects or subjects, integrating them into a functional, factual system. What is perceived refers to an identified referent with a logical response: this solid wooden door gives me access to the garden. The other path concerns the subterranean face of what is perceived. The object slides into a realm where meaning replaces fact, where function splits to reveal a dimension as vague as it is effective — the unconscious and symbolic dimension of things. The door then becomes, for example, “a place of passage, a mediating image that opens onto a beyond of consciousness.” (Dictionnaire symbolique des rêves, Georges Romey, p. 505, Albin Michel.)

Two worlds coexist, like the two sides of a coin. And even if only one side is perceived or taken into account, the other remains present and active.

​

We begin to understand that our relationship with things may not differ so much between waking and dreaming states.

​

Ramana Maharshi, a 20th-century Indian sage, spoke of three states inherent to existence: the dream state, the waking state, and deep sleep. For him, there is no real difference between waking and dreaming. Or if there is, perhaps just one — an arbitrary one: duration. The waking state is merely a longer dream than what we call dreaming. In both cases, we are dealing with a mental production, a construction he deemed unreal. What remains is dreamless sleep, the state where nothing exists — no suffering, no ego — only the Self remains, which he considered the ultimate state.

 

III. Inside — Outside: Mirror (Let’s Play)

I propose a game in which what is outside and what is inside become intimately connected. During this game, we will learn to see the external as a revealer of what lies within us — as a precise and concrete reflection of what inhabits us. In other words, we will approach reality through the symbolic path.

​

How do we access this path?

Through projection.

​

The Tarot of Marseille is a remarkable projective tool.

Just as one might prepare a piano to make it sound differently, I have prepared the space we are in tonight. I selected 22 elements from this room (a column, a wall, a door…) and associated each one with a Major Arcana card from the Tarot of Marseille (there are 22 in total).

​

We will now conduct a drawing that will weave a connection between a person and this space — turning this apartment into a projection space.