In November 2020, I started an ongoing performance project in Leyton called the Leyton Curtain Performance in North East London in the upholstery company Pekalp of London. I developed the performance that engages in an architectural transformation of the textile and furniture upholstery workshop into a combined production facility and cultural meeting place. The aim of the project is to keep the spirit of the place as a textile workshop when weaved into the new character of the future venue as a cultural meeting place. The focus will be to create ways of letting the combined performative interventions and documentation that will inform the transformation of the place in its architectural design and materiality. The vision of the project is community empowerment with the intention, not only to build a scene for the local community, but most of all to engage the public to participate in its making, choreographed as a task-making movement-performance in the specific site.
Increasingly it has become clearer that the approach I apply in my research projects, is a translation from the experiences of performance making into the methodology of architectural design. It is applying the understanding from one field into another. My arguments are therefore typically based on figures of speech in the form of analogies that I have taken from performance making and applied into architecture.
On the back wall in the Leyton workshop, there is a row of templates and patterns hanging for the cabinet makers. In the foreground the photo pliant pieces of textile a framing the view. My project vibrates between the two positions, between the intentional patterns and the curious attention to draping textiles.
