What is ‘We’? Five Short Videos on Collective Life
What do we mean when we deploy ‘we’? What are the inclusions and exclusions implicit as definitions, emancipations, productions, materials, laws and structures of kinship that organise through the collective pronoun?
If as Donna Haraway argues in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature that ‘[g]rammar is politics by other means’ (p. 3) then pronouns become the starting point for a consideration of architecture’s collective politics.
In particular it becomes necessary to decode and uncover what hides behind the most deployed collective pronoun in English — ‘we’: We architects, we designers, we the public, we the nation, we the family, we and them, we the people, what do we want, how will we organise, what are we going to do about it?
Is ‘we’ different from ‘us’? Is it possible to take a declarative statement without its use? Can we (there we go again…) make a statement of action about a concern without its use? Does ‘we’ distance ‘us’ from the non-human?
The following short videos from students at the RCA’s Master of Research (MRes) in Architecutre programme explore the question.
We/Me (Nuria Benítez Gómez 3'10'’)
Where and how is the space between more than one body, the space between two or more ideas. This short film explores the combination –or separation– of pigments, of fluids, metaphorically reflecting on the boundaries that define ‘we’ and define ‘me’.
WE (Mariano Cuofano 3'57'’)
How many spaces can I be in at the same time, in my imagination? WE are all the people inside us, all the people that we remember, and the relation between us and the social.
Observations (Moritz Dittrich 2'30'’)
We are observers, spectators, analysers, critics, interpreters. Everything we see, hear, feel, taste or smell form our individual perspectives. Do we define as a part of a common ‘we’?
Trace (Wanying Li 1'45'’)
We have a thing with ‘underground’. Underground is a network as well as a boundary in our daily life. In this underground people gather here for a moment, a momentary ‘we’, enroute to all different directions.
Look (Ching-Hung Lin 1'34'’)
We could look at so many differences in our daily life, and yet be influenced by those same differences. What are the future advances that will affect our understanding of ‘we’?
