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Wynn Chandra
Diploma 9
This project is conceived as the journey of a series of rooms in multiple scale and forms. As the journey unfolds, it cruises by the city, the sea, and the landscape, but it begins and ends as an insular single space - an island. The island-ness aspect of a room takes a form of a cruise liner. The ship is a floating city, the one that we traverse into to escape the boundaries of everyday lives we set ourselves in; our room, our house, our work place, our city.The story of how the ship’s journey unfolds is based on a precedent of another island. During WWI, when Europe was fractured and countries were forming allegiances and expanding their borders, a new territory was formed inwardly into a small room. This video performs the construct and dispersion of Cabaret Voltaire. The war is a confrontation that triggered the forming of the room and also annihilated it. Like the collision of culture that formed the Cabaret, the narrative of the ship will capture a journey and a moment of disruption that transforms its limits into a stage for a territorial war. The project uses this event to stage the beginning of a new territory. The image of the rock collided into the ship’s hull marks the moment when two territories collide into one another. The map shows the fabrication of a territory that is bound between the two distinct entities, one is the epitome of man’s desire to machine experience, and the other is nature, precarious and unpredictable. They overlooking one another and forced to negotiate their limits.A form of control is enforced; sheet pile is laid out to avoid seawater permeating into the site and displace the ship. A territory is now defined. The structural intervention becomes a platform for the ship to remanufacture itself out to the landscape. As it eventually stabilised, the ship’s interior excavation begins and the contents of the dead machine are to take on the new role. Floating structure is introduced to extract fuel and maintain its final capsizing position – and with it, the ship regains back its control over nature. As the fuel is extracted and some displaced, areas of the floating platform are open to the public. Inhabiting the pools, were are again defining the boundaries within which the event that shaped the pool is staged and consumed.Now a stable wreck, the ship becomes a steel cliff, and the “excavation” of the ship provides the materials to allow it further extending its territory. Steel is forged, molded, re-rolled, pipes are re-used to pump and channel the water off the shore and up to quarry site. The quarried granite is tiled onto the pools and the re-manufactured steel clad the mountain.The sailing ship was a man’s triumph over nature - the sea was a mere backdrop a play inside its shell. Now, as it is permanently anchored, the sea becomes a force of disruption, perpetually confronting the ship’s limits. Water infiltrates the landscape, and with tide the pools are at times submerged. The two entities depleted themselves - the ship wanted to claim the mountain but at the end it eats the skin and bone of the dying vessel until it eventually dematerializes. When the battle comes to an end - it becomes ambiguous whether the ship had won by transfiguring itself into the landscape or rather the island had fully consumed it. A new territory has formed, but without the ship as a bordering presence, it is no longer a landmark. Gradually, the territory is devoured by nature and remains as a carcass, and from time to time disappears when washed away by the tide.