Hijack, Deconstruct and Rebuild: How to Turn an Office Building Into a Home.

This article originally appeared in Judas Magazine

Imagine a space — limitless by boundaries. Devoid of notion. Empty of self. Call it a blank slate, a tabula rasa… a canvas, if you will. Or name it inhospitable. Perhaps even better, say it is “a grey concrete nexus where hope goes to die”, as Vice labelled it in its London Rental Opportunity of the Week feature. A disembodied remnant of a time bygone fixed in formaldehyde to be displayed in all its decaying glory to the eyeless glaze of Canary Wharf. Or maybe,

Midway upon the journey of your life; You find yourself within a forest dark; For the straightforward path had been lost, (Dante, in Inferno)

and here, a rebours, you find yourself a piece of home. A place unlike the rest, nestled between the downward u-shaped stream of the river Thames. A space discordant with its vibrancy and life. What lies before us isn’t an office in disuse nor an idyllic Farrow & Ball-tinted ‘rental opportunity of the week’ — but rather a home for the deconstructivist aesthetes. For the modern-day Des Esseintes, for the hijackers of routine and for the reclaimers of space. This is what Alexander, Mune and Domantas call home.

In this hidden corner surrounded by towering concrete, lies what used to be an office but is now the home to a collective family of friends, artists, thinkers, designers and all-round aesthetes. Sure, we could limit ourselves to describing the skeleton of the now defunct office that resided within this building, but Palaeontology really isn’t our thing. Besides, the authors at Vice already beat us to it with their agonising post-mortem article describing the deceased office as “personality-void”, “bleak”, “joyless” and ultimately a “grey hell”. Arguably, the aesthetic of the office doesn’t appeal to the masses — how would you decorate such space? What curtain fabrics could you possibly find to match the “purple-by-way-of-grey carpet that has been mashed down to a sort of paste by one billion tireless footsteps” (Vice). Surely, no respectable interior designer could come to your rescue! Without a doubt, the author of this Vice article must be a fan of Kant’s philosophy, in simplistic forms, Kant argued that aesthetic judgements may only be agreeable, good, beautiful or sublime meaning that for something to elicit a pleasurable response, it must be universally beautiful. But let’s face it, the aesthetic of a dilapidated office building certainly doesn’t scream beauty! But can there be an aesthetic for the unpleasant?

Yuriko Saito, in her book ‘Everyday Aesthetics’ suggests that when we are confronted with something seemingly unpleasant we go beyond simply judging it, we take action. A place like this office building in Canary Wharf therefore initiates creative action, an action only made possible by its apparent or societally-proclaimed ‘unpleasantness’. If you think about it, when you see something beautiful, it is indeed pleasing to the senses but the communication involved with it is finite, it ends there — there is no more scope for exploration nor creativity. The dialogue is dead. Yet, if you see something unpleasant, you are suddenly inspired by all the creative ways you could change it, bring it to life, make it better or more ‘you’. When Alexander, Mune and Domantas moved in, they didn’t see this run-down office building as an office, they saw it as an opportunity. A platform. A blank canvas that was for them to fill with as much creativity as possible. Their Canary Wharf abode wasn’t just a place for them to sleep; no, that would have been reductive — it’s a place where they come together and explore all the infinite ways in which they can change, or rather, hijack the remains of this office space. But before we delve any further into the realm of its aesthetics, we must first consider the word ‘hijack’ in its entirety for it is a word that carries a rather charged history along with its meaning. The action of hijacking involves, to a certain degree, an act of violence or rebellion but also one of revolution. The word, in itself hijacked by the English language in the 18th century, originates from pre-revolutionary France as ‘échaquer’ and literally means “the physical removal of the aristocrat from his carriage and his possessions” (The Guardian) The word was then adopted by bandits in England during the Industrial revolution and successively in the United States during the Prohibition. The word, in all its violent glory has always been associated with periods in time of great unrest and always followed by periods of enlightenment, revolution and drastic change. This word, mistakenly seen as unpleasant (just like the Canary Wharf office!) is, instead, an exquisitely powerful word and one that really describes this action involved in changing aesthetics.

Alexander, who is now enrolled on the Bachelors in Performance Art at Central Saint Martins, was one of the first to move into this office building after having outgrown his previous home. “We needed a whole new change and we didn’t just want to go to places like Hackney Wick or Manor House. We were craving a totally different aesthetic, something that can push your art and your tastes to a new surrealist coincidence of places”, he explains. And so, his wishes were met by the grandiosity of this Canary Wharf office space. A space nestled in between the artistically-devoid landscape of banks, private equity firms and shopping centres. Yet, to Alexander, “the extreme irony of creating this bohemian existence secretly in the midst of Canary Wharf” seemed delightfully refreshing. “Canary Wharf is the perfect set for our play”, he says, referring to the building’s barren, canvas-like aesthetic. This aesthetic can be dissociating for many or even ‘hellish’, but it is one that Alexander conspicuously compares to that of Goya’s Black Paintings reminding us that “things that are not immediately beautiful actually elicit more of a response.” These somewhat unpleasant aesthetics which traditional society shies away from, push us into creating new boundaries and parallelisms. This duality between the beautifully structured aesthetic and that of the unsightly is one that Alexander expresses both in life and through his performances. Alexander’s performances draw inspiration from literature, art, philosophy and mythology. Think of Greek Tragicomedies, where beauty, horror and pain collide to ultimately bring you a play that’s on the brink of pleasure. In his latest performance, Death Drop, Alexander explored the parallelisms between modern and classical characters assigning each a circle in Dante’s Inferno. The performance showed the characters in all their beauty engrossed in wrath, gluttony, lust and violence. By superimposing the beautiful with the grotesque, Alexander creates a dialogue between two subjects that seldom come together. “There is a discordance in the performance with it being beautifully arranged and choreographed and then this act in the middle that horrifies people”. It is this very clash of values, aesthetics and morals that Alexander is particularly interested in. By hijacking the integrity of the values we are inherently conditioned into believing, he provokes the audience creating the “perfect mode for people to start deconstructing things.” The audience, exposed to a new set of ideals, can now start a fresh conversation with other people but also a new dialogue with themselves.

One can’t help but draw an analogy between this process of deconstruction and re-assemblance of values and Alexander’s choice of living space. Both, as a matter of fact, are built on the same schematic structure and require the person to have an open mind as well as a predisposition for the unknown. And yet, people love to experience the frights of the unknown, don’t they? That thrillingly safe constraint of the roller coaster or that cinematically-induced scare of the horror film! But what happens when those safety nets we create around ourselves suddenly disintegrate? Performance artists like Valie Export break them for us. In Export’s Genital Panic, (1969) later re-visioned by Marina Abramovic, the audience is hijacked, guerilla-style, by her performance. Much like in Gustav Coubert’s iconic painting Origin Of The World (1866) that depicts the female genitals unashamedly to the world, Export’s performance consisted in walking into an art house cinema during an erotic screening wearing crotchless pants exposing her genitals. By attacking the audience within the safety of their sexually voyeuristic space, Export hijacks both their physical and mental space thus negating the pleasurable gratification that erotic films usually elicit. Once presented with the physical reality of sexual desire, however, the audience reacted with horror and disgust. The shock of real, carnal, lewd pleasure had punched a hole in their carefully tangled net of self-reassurance and now, fully exposed as though naked themselves, the crowd covered their eyes and looked away. As Alexander poignantly puts it, “these performances go completely against the normal evolutionary impulses and instincts and to be able to overcome that requires a higher mental ground”. Whilst many people might not have reached that higher ground, these performances are aimed at showing them they “don’t have to be subjects to any inherited values or instincts.” Yet Alexander is adamant that his performances, just like Export’s, must be tailored to a specific audience, one that allows for a dynamic communication between performance artists and crowd. “My art is definitely, in a way, aristocratic but an aristocracy of the mind not an aristocracy of birth”, he says. The masses don’t interest Alexander, through his performances he is not striving to teach or preach a righteous way, he is provoking an action. To react means to formulate an argument for and against what you have just seen and this reaction is what both Alexander and Mune are after. Yet if Alexander’s performances require a targeted audience, Mune’s instead choose to hijack the very integrity of the human body as well as its surroundings.

“I hijack the whole space around me”, says Mune. He does so by creating structural garments that verge on the sculptural more than the sartorial. Mune, a Fine Art graduate from the University of Marseille, uses his art to investigate the finality of the human body. In his opinion, for people nowadays, “having an objective and completing this objective is seen as the final goal”, but he insists that, for him, “it is completely the opposite, I don’t strive to arrive to any final goal because to me this is death”. As a society we are told to aspire to certain standards, especially in this capitalist world where jobs in finance and economics like those practiced in Canary Wharf are seen as ‘premium’ carriers. But, what happens when you achieve those goals and “arrive at the end point, then, what’s there left to do?”, asks Mune. To him, the exploration of the body and its surrounding space is fundamental to his art and wellbeing. Are we constrained by the limits of our material skin? Mune treats the body in exactly the same way he treats this office space: as a canvas. “The space here encourages me to fill it and make the most of it” and, by doing so, Mune’s persona extends into the building blurring the lines between physical and nonphysical space. Through his performances Mune invites us to reimagine the position humans occupy through space. Are we always the subjects or can we also exist as objects? Perhaps it is hard to imagine oneself as an object; after all, don’t we all have a mind and besides, didn’t Descartes famously say “I think, therefore I am?” But who exactly is this ‘I’? “When I started my second year at University I had this huge personal crisis about my ego, self-production and the way art is usually displayed in museums”, says Mune, who then decided to question the very foundations of what it means to exist, both as an artist and as a human being.

Mune’s approach to aesthetics is a very personal one: by allowing his body to be transformed into an object of art he is asking the viewer to see him objectively, just as you would when looking at a sculpture or a painting. By doing so, Mune releases his ego from the confines of his body and that imperative ‘I’ is released into the space for us to consume. One of the first Philosophers and Art Historians to merge the aesthetics of self and object was Robert Vischer. He used the German term einfühlung that directly translates to “feeling oneself into” to describe the feeling of identifying with a piece of art. This term, loosely translated into English as ‘empathy’ opened a new dialogue for both artists and critical theorists to explore new ideals within the realm of art. One such theorist was Theodor Lipps who explained that empathy is not “a sensation in one’s body but rather feeling something, namely, oneself, into an aesthetic object.” Through his art, Mune hijacks this very space, occupying it both “physically as well as non-physically.” For Mune, the embodiment of space is therefore of vital importance because it is instrumental to his performances. “Since I moved here, little by little, I’ve been expanding through all the space”, he recalls, comparing his previous living arrangement to that of Canary Wharf: “the house where I lived before was a typical house. I had a room and was in it most of the time because the house didn’t allow me to push my creative boundaries within its space.” This office, instead, provides Mune with a workspace that constantly inspires and drives him to create new pieces of art. His latest project utilises the very structure of the building as a platform “I want to create an installation within this space using straws that will grow from the corner of the room” he explains, “little by little the structure will grow and take over more and more of the space.” This empty, hollow shell of an old office building is thus slowly, but surely being hijacked, deconstructed and completely reshaped by its inhabitants. Yet the conversation between them and their environment is symbiotic, they hijack their surroundings just as much as the surroundings hijack them.

“I have fitted into this surrounding with ease but subconsciously I have gone through a transformation”, says Domantas, a Fashion Design & Marketing student at Central Saint Martins. Living within the structures of an office building creates a dynamic whereby you not only adapt to its surreal aesthetic but also expose yourself to the working and living environment of others: “here, I feel like I’m entering the world of other creative people around me and this makes me feel like I’m in the right place.” There is a dualistic element involved in living here — the structure of the building was created as a working environment but it is now also a home and, on top of that, the world that surrounds it is built upon commercialism and conformity, yet here exists a space that exemplifies freedom and self-expression. “I feel like this contrast is pushing our extremes, we are more alert of what we are doing because we are presented with exactly the opposite outside” Domantas is aware of this collision and whilst he agrees that living here is somewhat dissociating, he says he feels like “we have created this little bubble that constantly gets pricked by a pin that tries to break it. This pin can be anything from the buildings or people around us or even natural factors like the wind”. One expects there to be a sense of alienation between environments so different from one another. How could they possible collide or come together? Yet, for Domantas, differences are what make life exciting. “Being exposed to things you don’t like enhances other aspects of your experience, for example a person who is blind will have a better sense of hearing”, he explains, believing that choosing not to like something or completely rejecting it actually “limits your experience and your self-development.”

We live in an age of repetition, trends, fads and ephemeral fashions, one where people follow a path with blinders on each side of their eyes and headphones in their ears. Some people exist without questioning why they are here, what their purpose is or what their personal aspirations are. They follow this linear, straight-forward path dictated by others and, like automata, stick to the rigorous outlines of society. As children, we are gifted with colouring books clearly marking the areas to colour within. The finite lines. The boundaries. We grow up within them and adapt to them. We condition ourselves to not even thinking about what exists outside those barriers. Take Zamyatin’s We, a book that inspired George Orwell to write 1984. In We, people exist within this enclosed city that is reassuringly safe. The walls built around it ensure no one steps outside or even thinks about stepping to the other side or questioning what there is. Are we scared? Sometimes we ought to be. Hans Bellmer, an influential and highly controversial artist, pushes us to experience our repressed emotions, fears and taboos. His deconstructed and disfigured dolls hijack the aesthetic of the human form and haunt us with thoughts and feelings that sometimes we wish stayed in the darkest corners of our minds. By using the figure of the doll, the uncanny representation of human form, Bellmer invites us to reconsider the duality between body and mind. Our bodies exist and occupy a physical space, what people see is this biologically and evolutionarily flawless piece of flesh, what they can’t see is what’s happening inside. The pain, angst, all the anxieties that torture our insides. These dolls with their bulges, missing pieces and confused anatomy are Bellmer’s way of showing us how the body would look from the inside out. What he is encouraging us to experience is akin to an out of body experience. Suddenly, we become dissociated and by doing so, we end up finding ourselves. This may sound paradoxical, but it is something that Domantas is quite familiar with, “you need to separate from yourself and throw yourself in a completely different situation and experiment with your body, your mind and your psychological states as well as your capabilities and fears.” Accepting and understanding one’s fears is easier said than done. Yet, if you understand how to channel emotions, and along with it all your fears and failures, you suddenly become motivated, driven and push with them to fight back. “Experimenting is the only one way you can really discover yourself and sometimes you need to reject all the things you like, adore or are too familiar with.” This dissociation you create between your ideologies, aesthetics and core set of values is a process that allows you to “become a human being as opposed to just a clone because once you become a clone you actually become a clown”. We are presented with a choice and we can either chose to live, quite happily, as copies or we can explore all the multi-faceted sides of our existence. “You need to fully deconstruct whatever you’re looking at to fully appreciate its construction”, says Domantas, reminding us that “even behind aesthetically beautiful things the process behind it might not be beautiful.”

The artists behind this Canary Wharf home, just like in Duchamp’s Fountain or Warhol’s Brillo Box, hijacked our perception of thought so that we could no longer see the office building for what it was, but rather for what it had become. The urinal is now a piece of art and the mundanity of the soap pads a collector’s item. This reshuffling of meaning opens up the dialogue for artists, thinkers and all-round aesthetes to play with different structures, canvases and platforms allowing us to recognise beauty even in the darkest of corners.