Losing Site: Folded Morphologies of Photography and Brutalist Architecture

Abstract

This chapter explores Thalmann’s own artistic practice as it seeks to destabilize conventional methods of representation by radically transforming the ways in which we experience or perceive architecture and the urban environment. Thalmann’s series Utopos uses both images she has created herself and archival documents to rethink the meaning of history, memory, and loss while disregarding and exalting the irreverence of monumental Brutalist architecture and photographs. Thalmann reveals how architectural spaces can be problematized by traumatic histories involving protests, shootings, and violence. The project began by focusing on a shooting that occurred in 1992 at Concordia University where Thalmann’s uncle, Phoivos Ziogas, was a professor killed during the massacre. To work through the emotional implications of his death and its reverberations throughout the family, the images of cold monolithic Brutalist buildings, public spaces and monuments became distorted, organic, and malleable through the mechanism of folding, collage, and analog/digital photography. Also, recent work follows the slippage of meaning of images and objects through the hybridized methodologies of architecture and sculpture. Thalmann’s practice makes visible the complex ways that memory and place are intrinsically interlinked and fosters space for the processing of trauma and grief.