The presence of absence: conceptualising absence in the city through contemporary art practice.

This practice-led research project investigates sites of absence in three cities: New York (USA), Varanasi (India) and Shanghai (China). The ‘presence of absence’ is examined in these sites by means of the overarching philosophical and organizational framework ‘deconstruction’, as articulated by Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction as a methodology and approach offers a way of displacing the conceptualization and representation of a city through ‘presence’. Presence manifests in two distinct ways: firstly, through focusing on the physical structures or objects, content, systems or rituals informing and constituting the dominant discourses in each city; secondly a privileging of the ocular over other senses both when experiencing, and subsequently representing, each city. By focusing on absence as the research site, this project problematizes the dominant discourses and ways of conceptualizing urban space. Fieldwork in each city identifies sites of absence, which are then investigated through art practice. Both the fieldwork and practice employ haptic methods to access a broader multi-sensory experience of the urban environment. <br><br>The identification of absences is achieved through a medical process of biopsy, a procedural method that structures the fieldwork in each city. The biopsy method of extracting data, conceptually and materially, has enabled a consideration of the city ‘as body’; this, in turn, enables the foregrounding of an embodied experience of each city. It also creates a connection with the selected haptic method of walking the city. The project employs the haptic methods and the procedural biopsy specifically to intervene in normative ways of investigating and perceiving a city. <br><br>In this research, the fieldwork has revealed a diversity of absences identified through the biopsies of, for example, death, air quality, gender, minority groups, ritual, pilgrimage, mapping, transient structures and historical uses of site. In the resulting artworks, new understandings of absence are highlighted through the examination of power dynamics, social exclusion, cultural rituals, haptic qualities of landscape, and the role and materiality of everyday structures and objects. Through the process of making and exhibiting these artworks, and through an investigation of absence as both subject and site, the research offers new knowledge and understandings of absence in and of each city.