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On program.

“Program is not form. Program is agenda” (Koolhaas, paraphrased).

) a list of items to be discussed at a formal meeting

) a plan of things to be done, problems to be addressed

) underlying intentions or motives of a particular person

) an appointment diary

) hidden agenda: secret or ulterior motive for something

Our human body is a manifestation of separation and boundary. Ostensibly where skin ends, we end. What is considered ‘of the body’ is called interior; all else is called exterior. Yet this distinct duality does not prevent the touching of one by the other. From the earliest experiences, our identities as individuals take shape through separation, as one body parts from another. Neil Leach describes that this “loss, whether it is actual or imaginary, can serve to ... reinforce an identity.” Our boundaries are therefore not sufficiently explained or delineated by just our skin; they are somehow found in relationship, in the nowhere of otherness. This thesis plays with these two facets of separation, otherness and absence.

The agenda of the thesis is situated as ‘grounding absence.’ In an effort to do so, the thesis will be undertaken as a small collection of clothing architecture which pursue innerspatial operations of sensorial interplay within a subtle siting of alterity at the scale of the body. The agenda “does not intend to disfigure the subject but to substantiate perception” (Breton). These items of clothing allow an understanding of absence through the way they articulate space, and how they shape, force, and rest on the body. The agenda articulates absence as

) the nonexistence or lack of

) failure to attend or appear when expected

) inattentiveness; preoccupation; absent-mindedness

) space; loss; entropy

The role of the client is that of a user, a player, an inhabiter, and most importantly a wearer. The user is patterned after She, of Agnès Varda’s film La Pointe Courte, yet the client is also He. As a wearer, the client will sense the loss of a He or a She.

The agenda will be articulated by collecting material from the site of Sète in southern France. Material from the site may include oyster shells (biological calcium carbonate), which would then be altered by grinding it into powder. It would then be incorporated into porcelain clay, molded into tiles, plates, shingles, scales which would be aggregated and attached to produce hoods, skirts, bodices. Other materials to structure and shape the clothing apart from calcium carbonate and porcelain include sheet rubber, steel, wood, wool. The project will commence with investigating material, and proceed with investigating aggregation, investigating links, and invesitgating form.