Episode #RolePlay : 1

Surfatial speaks with Bora Baboci. Bora talks about the range of scales of the contexts of our times, current tendencies for projections of desires, and the risk of generation of superficial knowledge. We talk of libraries and systems of categorisation, which she illustrates with a memory from her childhood and with Luis Borges’s whimsical encyclopaedia. Further, we talk of the specific experience the internet offers vis-à-vis libraries, how it filters knowledge and perspectives. She explores expertise through the lens of our times–the idea of the practicing of the everyday in the process of creating a person, and the devaluation of the everyday in favour of specialisation. She talks of role-play and expertise in the context of dance, specifically Tango, which she practices herself. The memory of the body: the process of building expertise everyday, and the problem of external expectations moulding presentation; the pressures of role-play within our structures, and the imposition of ill-fitting simplified roles upon us. She concludes with how role-play could also be healthy in the journey of identity formation–she elucidates with a beautiful dance analogy for assuming role-play as a circular visitation of the self as it turns to examine itself handling reality.

#Bora Baboci is an Albanian architect and visual artist based in Berlin, currently a fellow at ZK/U. Her work explores informal spatial production as well as tries to address collective memory by twisting aspects of popular culture and folklore. Until recently, she was part of the ADIP at the TU Berlin, researching spaces of commons and the emerging collectives within dense, heterogeneous urban settings.

ISPISP_Bora_Baboci

Surfatial

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