#ArchinectMeets is a series of interviews with members of the architecture community that use Instagram as a creative medium. With the series, we ask some of Instagram’s architectural photographers, producers and curators about their relationship to the social media platform and how it has affected their practice.
Social media has undeniably affected the way we perceive, interpret and share opinions about architecture today. While we use our own account, @Archinect, as a site for image curation and news content, we wanted to ask fellow Instagram users how they navigated the platform.
We spoke to Neyran Turan, an architect and partner at Nemestudio. Through their instagram page, @nemestudio, they get to explore their chosen themes of accumulation and digital waste taken up in their studio through a platform born of those traits.
How did you begin curating your Instagram profile in relation to your professional practice?
We value images and image-making as critical aspects for architectural knowledge production and practice, but have been relatively slow in understanding social media’s potential to cultivate that aspect for communicating our work to the world. We started an Instagram profile sometime last year in an attempt to create an alternative platform to share our work. Until then, our main platform for sharing work had been our website, which invites a different form of reception and engagement with our work.
View this post on InstagramNew Cadavre Exquis, 2017. . Drawing 10 - “Reassembly as Copper Almost Demolished” . Each Re-Assembly of New Cadavre Exquis is initially a scaleless compositional pile, in which various minuscule and giant objects are flattened in scale. Upon gaining a material definition, each Re-Assembly obtains architectural properties such as scale and program. Ranging from a small retail shop, to large scale housing and infrastructural buildings, each Re-Assembly stages and exploits the potentials of a particular archetypal composition and turns it into a building, which is eventually destabilized by time and the materiality of its mass. While depicting the formation of an architectural project from the accumulation of digital excess from the 3D Warehouse to the building material debris, the project positions architectural materiality within a time span from construction, maintenance, ruination, demolition, and waste and alludes to the kinds of ordinary activities that take place around the material practice of architecture. . Honorable Mention, The Architect’s Newspaper 2017 Best of Design Awards for Architectural Representation (Digital Category). @archpaper @calnewmedia . #nemestudio #ANBestofDesign #architecturalrepresentation #architecturalmateriality #newcadavreexquis #anotherexquisitecorpse #digitalreadymades #mattersaroundarchitecture #superarchitects #next_top_architects #nextarch
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Your article in the most recent issue of Perspecta points to the contemporary condition of excessive accumulation and consumption. Do you think of social media, or even your own Instagram profile, as an enabler or product of overconsumption?
That piece refers to the relationships between material and digital accumulation, and aims to re-stage making of digital images as part of architecture’s materiality. It talks about the formation of an architectural project from the accumulation of digital debris from the 3D Warehouse to the material debris of waste.
Obviously, Instagram not only allows an exponential accumulation of imagery but at the same time triggers new forms of visual sensibility. For us, the material ramifications of these conversations are perhaps more interesting. Extremely fast image sharing also enables a hunger for certain forms of slowness, attention, or material specificity, for instance (instead of seeing Instagram’s potential solely in relation to questions and problems of representation). As articulated in the Perspecta piece you mention, the ideas around the material and the digital both enable and undermine each other. In that way, Instagram might be misused to mine these kinds of perverse and unexpected correlations.
View this post on InstagramA Rubbish Odyssey, 2018. Presented here: Video 1, Scene 4. . NEMESTUDIO’s contribution to the 3-Ways exhibition at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles @aplusd_la. On view until August 19. . A Rubbish Odyssey is an extension of our New Cadavre Exquis project. It depicts the formation of an architectural project from the accumulation of digital excess from the 3D Warehouse to the building material debris. While re-staging the making of digital images as part of architecture’s materiality, the three videos allude to the elusive nature of scale in architectural thinking. . . . #nemestudio #architecturalrepresentation #architecturalmateriality #newcadavreexquis #anotherexquisitecorpse #arubbishodssey
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What have you hoped to communicate about architecture through your posts?
We have way more work on our table than the things we share on our website. So, Instagram allows us to share work that do not necessarily fit to the categories of our website or to circulate them before they are published in long-term channels (publications etc). Instagram also allows us to catalog our work in some ways, making sure things do not fall through the cracks.
All work gets credit and worth a mention in this way. Sometimes sharing this kind of work allows us to see our work differently. It is like a drawing becoming something else when framed and put on the wall. Deciding which work to “frame and put on our Instagram wall” becomes an interesting curatorial project.
View this post on Instagram“Re-Assembly as Stucco,” New Cadavre Exquis, 2017. . . Each Re-Assembly of New Cadavre Exquis is initially a scaleless compositional pile, in which various minuscule and giant objects are flattened in scale. Upon gaining a material definition, each Re-Assembly obtains architectural properties such as scale and program. Ranging from a small retail shop, to large scale housing and infrastructural buildings, each Re-Assembly stages and exploits the potentials of a particular scaleless composition and turns it into a building, which is eventually destabilized by time and the materiality of its mass. . Honorable Mention, The Architect’s Newspaper 2017 Best of Design Awards for Architectural Representation (Digital Category). @archpaper @calnewmedia . #nemestudio #ANBestofDesign #architecturalrepresentation #architecturalmateriality #newcadavreexquis #anotherexquisitecorpse #digitalreadymades #mattersaroundarchitecture
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How do you treat your social media differently than your own personal website?
Our website groups our work as Projects, Research and Publications. Originally when we designed the website, we did not like the idea of having a separate exhibitions or drawings section but as our practice grew, we found ourselves collecting another kind of archive (exhibit photos, commissioned drawings etc.) that were not shared with anyone. We like to use our Instagram account for work that belongs to these kinds of categories for instance.
Also, since Instagram allows to focus on one image or video as one statement instead of communicating many drawings of a project under one heading, we like to use this aspect to communicate particular ideas about specific parts of our projects. Instagram is like a lecture (which is more casual and informal) whereas a website is more like published material, which has a very different relationship to its audience. We are interested in reaching out to multiple audiences, and each of these formats (website, Instagram) creates a different kind of constituency and allows a different kind of conversation to unfold.
View this post on Instagram“Re-Assembly 3: Monastery,” Our Junk, Their Ruin, 2018. . Currently on view at @YBCA, until March 2019. . #nemestudio #ourjunktheirruin #architectureasmeasure #archilovers #BayAreaNow #BAN8 #ybca #drawingswithinadrawing #architectureandtheanthropocene #materialityandmedia
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