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beginning; ZERO

Part 1 Project 2002
Joachim Reiter
University of Greenwich | UK
“Photography has not yet achieved anything like its full stature, has not articulated its own instinctive structure. Yet, this lack of “results” does not contradict the almost unbelievable impact which photographic vision has had upon our culture. It is unprecedented that such a “mechanical” thing as photography, regarded so contemptuously in the creative sense, should have acquired in barely a century of evolution the power to become one of the primary visual forces in our life… Many people may not realise it, but the present standard of visual expression in any field, painting, sculpture, architecture, and especially the advertising arts, is nourished by the visual food which the new photography provides.” Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

The program of the building is based on the ideas and questions I raised in my dissertation “Photography a two-dimensional experience” were the above quote is analysed.

As a flat two-dimensional surface, the photograph has multiple meanings to see a composition of forms is to encounter a potential object of fascination and admiration. The surface- what lies beyond it? What is reality if the object looks like that in a picture? An innovation to speculate and fantasise about the possible reality.

My language of form has derived from the workshops, video installation, photographs and the numerous models that I have made. Where the three-dimensional spatial relationships are the key to how space is occupied and perceived. A space that is formed out of an idea that is striped down to its pure essence of spatial interaction and experience. Sliding, movement, underneath, mass, folded, circulation, in-between, additional, verticality, behind, incline, negative etc. and more spaces is formed within, above, below, under and in-between the visual mediators which links the building to the site and the historical context. The visual mediators pinpoint important views and axis from the old maps I have found in the city’s archive.

The main space, formed by the visual mediators is going to exhibit the visual art of photography on the different photographic-walls that is allocated around the building. A hybrid of spaces with their own spatial quality’s and programs which includes offices, cafe/shop and a gallery that is created within, above, below, under and in-between the visual mediators and the boundaries of the site.

Joachim Reiter


Rythym, movement - a dancing structure, are fundamental precepts of Joachim's design tutors. They have taught children and students for over twenty years from Moscow to London. The models and constructions of their students are poetic and energetic an they trace a lineage of their tutoring back to the Russian avant-garde, the constructivists.

The students in the atelier formulated though a series of fabrication workshops, a hybrid structure. They used a variety of materials and structural themes. Their fabrication was tested and applied across one of the East London line station sites at Dalston in Hackney.

Joachim developed the themes of his dissertation representing the collapse of the photograph in an image driven society - a society of spectacle, through the design project. He modelled and remodelled, photographed and rephotographed his project, collapsing it and turning it inside out. Following the site in Hackney he took the project back to his own origins and his hometown in Sweden. The new photographic gallery was inflected and reflected to create a constantly shifting series of gallery spaces, constructing - beginning; ZERO

2002
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