Image Credits: Hélène Binet, 2012. Courtesy: ammann // gallery.
In the beginning, there is a bird: the brown stage-maker that lives in the mountain forests of northeast Queensland in Australia.
This particular bird is the touchstone of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s thought about art. For these authors, art begins with the animal when the animal traces a territory and makes a house, what the two authors define as “the territory-house system.” (1) As they recall in What is Philosophy?: “Every morning the Scenopoetes dentirostris, a bird of the Australian rain forests, cuts leaves, makes them fall to the ground, and turns them over so that the paler, internal side contrasts with the earth. In this way it constructs a stage for itself like a ready-made; and directly above, on a creeper or a branch, while fluffing out the feathers beneath its beak to reveal their yellow roots, it sings a complex song made up from its notes and, at intervals, those of other birds that it imitates: it is a complete artist” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 184). In Mille Plateaux, they had already stated: “The brown stage-maker (Scenopoetes dentirostris) lays down landmarks each morning by dropping leaves it picks from its tree, and then turning them upside down so the paler underside stands out against the dirt: inversion produces a matter of expression. The territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark; it is the mark that makes the territory” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 348).
The appearance of a territory implies a becoming-expressive of the milieu components whenever a territorial or qualitative mark is produced. However, a milieu component only becomes a qualitative mark when it does not fulfil any function (a function would be a bird’s song when the bird is trying to seduce a lover or dispel an enemy) or ceases to fulfil it, comprising an auto-objective purposeless, and liberating instead a proper expressiveness, a rhythm composed of colours, sounds, postures, and gestures, as it happens with the performance of the brown stage-maker. “The territory-house system transforms a number of organic functions - sexuality, procreation, aggression, feeding. But this transformation does not explain the appearance of the territory and the house; rather, it is the other way around: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and become expressive features, making possible a transformation of function” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 183). In the desert, informal paths, traced by animals, shepherds, nomads, human and non-human, appear in close relation to singularities (vegetation, patterns of winds, topographical features, etc.) drawing an intensive map of lines and multiplicities independent of any function of guidance through the smooth space of the desert. These are usually opposed to the stratified pathways (which in their turn are defined after negotiations, either geographical, socio-political or commercial). The vegetation combined with the winds, combined with the undulating dunes or flat sandbanks, combined with the lines drawn through time by animals and people create a house in which its planes are sensations.
Artists of the Land Art movement are familiar with these processes, understanding the emergence of expressive qualities or qualitative marks as the appearance of a territory, using them as matters of expression of their own work that, nevertheless, differs from the formers and produces something new. As Colette Garraud points out, for example, of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), an earthwork located on the Nevada desert consisting of two long, straight trenches the artist excavated moving about 240,000 tons of desert sandstone: “The artist appropriates, in a way, the characteristics of the site, making the immensity and silence of the desert penetrate the artwork” (Garraud, 1994, p.18). (2)
Straw Hut, Niamey desert, Lacaton & Vassal. Courtesy of the architects.
The architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal proceeded similarly when they looked for a place to build their house on the Niamey desert, a straw matting hut. The architects took six months to choose its location. During this period, they understood the desert as a tactile or haptic space, (3) identifying its singularities: an elevated sand dune, located at the intersection of fresh air currents that run through the desert following the direction of the river, the Niamey’s city lights at the horizon, and the celestial dome right above. These singularities defined the precise location of the small hut. They belong to its architectural composition more than the functions that the hut fulfils (of shelter, cooling or of providing basic amenities such as electric power it didn’t have). For Vassal, the location and the building allowed for another form of inhabiting: inhabiting the landscape of the desert through its sensibilia (the desert as a sensible and sensitive landscape, a plane populated by intensities), through the sensations it holds, now built up in the form of a hut. (4)
Deleuze and Guattari’s thought about the territory-house system and its implications on art theory are vast and hold several implications (including the definition of the origin of the work of art with the animal). We’ll argue that the link between territory, matters of expression, and the composition of sensations opens up the possibility of creating a “Poetic Landscape,” which borrows its name from an unrealised project by the architect Peter Zumthor.
In 1998, the Detmold's Literature Group invited several authors (Inger Christensen, Peter Waterhouse, Michael Hamburger, Yoko Tawada, among others) to write a poem for a place in the rural landscape near Bad Salzuflen, in Germany. This landscape is characterised by smooth and wide humid green hills, rolling lines of trees on the horizon and dense forest areas, where glades born to pay tribute to the sky and the stars. Each poet chose a specific place in the landscape and Zumthor was responsible for designing a collection of buildings to house each poem, allowing for anyone who sept in to read it. Each place was doubly interpreted: by the poem and the building, and both could be experienced in the place that gave birth to them. The various places, accessible on foot, would form a Poetic Landscape, implying an intensive walk between landscape, architecture, and poetry. Not strangely, the poets selected singular moments in the landscape - where trees geometrically align in the plain, where a large horizontal plane is covered with leaves during the autumn and turns into a hill, where several paths tear the dense forest, encountering in a glade - in an approach that Zumthor called of “seismographic work,” as if these places corresponded to points of energy, points of ecstasy of the body of the landscape, which then brought the form of the building. However, as Zumthor denotes: “The text and the building do not touch. The poem is not in the building, the building says nothing about the poem. The poem does not know the building and does not talk about it. But both the text and the building speak of the same place.” (5)
Model for Poetic Landscape, Peter Zumthor. Courtesy of the architect.
Looking at the drawings and the models made, the buildings emerge in moments of tension, on a steep slope, defying the very laws of gravity as those of the underground aquifer flows; or on the threshold of a plane, where the landscape changes nature and two meadows encounter; or between an open meadow and the beginning of the dense forest, in which part of the building hides. Rather than enhancing or intensifying the landscape’s characteristics the buildings compose with these territorial motifs while transforming themselves into territorial counterpoints. “On the one hand, expressive qualities entertain internal relations with one another that constitute territorial motifs (…). On the other hand, expressive qualities also entertain other internal relations that produce territorial counterpoints: this refers to the manner in which they constitute points in the territory that place the circumstances of the external milieu in counterpoint.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 350). The building’s aesthetic composition (which presupposes placement, form, materiality, atmosphere, etc.) is born out of the expressive qualities’ inner impulses (for example when a building’s placement depends of a territorial mark such as the top of a dune or a hillside or the materials resonate the milieu’s components such as in rammed-earth). The buildings produce a territory, that results from both the internal impulses and external circumstances. “Relations between matters of expression express relations of the territory to internal impulses and external circumstances: they have an autonomy within this very expression. In truth, territorial motifs and counterpoints explore potentialities of the interior or exterior milieu” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 350).
According to Deleuze & Guattari, territorial motifs are rhythmic faces or characters and territorial counterpoints are melodic landscapes. In the first case, rhythm is a character born of the expressiveness of the qualitative mark instead of a rhythm linked to a character, impulse, or other. In the second case, rhythm emerges as a sonorous landscape in counterpoint to a virtual landscape (instead of associating the latter to a melody). In both cases, rhythm possesses an expressive autonomy. It is through rhythm that the milieus’ components are transformed into matters of expression or qualitative marks. However, they remain contained in their own expressiveness. They are placards or posters, as the two authors write. The rhythm made of motifs and counterpoints, in its turn, create a style. “In the motif and the counterpoint, the sun, joy or sadness, danger, become sonorous, rhythmic, or melodic” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 351).
This happens with poetry (as with music, one of the examples by Deleuze & Guattari). Words possess a rhythm in their own. They are, by principle, language’s answer to chaos. When combined, they form another rhythm through relations between matters of expression, creating characters and landscapes. In the poetic form, this rhythm has its own plane, an autonomy from description and representation, conquering an expressiveness that thrives the word back to the pure forces, those that in the beginning belonged to chaos and are now crystallised.
Perhaps like no other form of artistic expression, poetry appropriates the force and the singularities embedded in the landscape through its rhythm, allowing those who read the poem to penetrate the landscape and feel it within their bodies, that are transformed, in their turn, by the words in the landscape. The rhythm of words, of the voice, of the air that rises and descends through the vocal cords inside the body, joining the lungs to the brain, turns into a gust of wind, perfume of flowers or moist soil. Poetry reacts immediately to the singularities of the landscape, transforming these into sensations. This idea is pursued, for instance, by Matsuo Bashō, considered one of the masters of the Japanese poetic form of the haiku. The haiku does not describe a landscape, instead, it allows the reader to see herself or himself contemplating a landscape that magically appears as if in front of their eyes. Only a very skilfully poet can achieve this effect, which involves a transformation of the reader’s body in the landscape through the tactility of the word (poetry is closer to the oral language than any other literary form as well) so that the reader becomes-landscape, becomes-wind, becomes-flower.
The local government changed and Zumthor’s project for a Poetic Landscape was not fulfilled. However, it is from that moment on that Zumthor changes his own thinking about the relationship between landscape and the work of architecture. (6) In his essay “Architecture and Landscape,” while evoking Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Monk by the Sea, Zumthor mentions: “An aesthetic experience: I see a man looking at the horizon line of the ocean with his back to the painter. Like the painter and the man in the painting, I look at the landscape, at the painted horizon, and feel the grandeur and vastness. A certain melancholy comes to the fore, imbued with the sense of a world that is infinitely bigger than I am but offers me sanctuary. In addition to the feeling that nature is close to me and yet larger that I am, landscape also gives me the feeling of being at home” (Zumthor, 2017, p. 95).
Aware that the work of architecture transforms the landscape, Zumthor seeks to understand it from its mysteries and its invisible matter. “First I have to look hard at the landscape, at the woods and trees, the leaves, the grasses, the animated surface of the earth, and then develop a feeling of love for what I see - because we don’t hurt what we love. Secondly, I have to take care. That is something I have learned from traditional agriculture, which uses the soil but is, at the same time, sustainable. It takes care of the things that nourish us. Thirdly, I must try to find the right measure, the right quantity, the right size and the right shape for the desired object in its beloved surroundings. The outcome is attunement or possibly even tension. (…) This kind of sensing is not a theoretical task; first and foremost, it means having faith in sensual perception” (Zumthor, 2017, pp. 98-99).
Zumthor’s sensual perception resembles the molecular perception defined by Deleuze & Guattari, that is closer to matter and its invisible fluxes and forces. One of the examples given by the two authors is the effect of drugs that opens the perception to a micro perception, (7) that can be of the body itself, of its matter, but also its unconsciousness, or of things, from music to landscapes. The molecular perception renders visible the invisible structures of reality, understanding its components from the molecular processes that happened before form, segmentation or stratification, but are kept in the internal structures, allowing to follow the fluxes, vectors, and gradients that envelop matter towards specification (its molar structure). In the landscape, the molecular perception allows to penetrate the landscape, the animism of its components, and to follow its invisible fluxes, determine the singularities that punctuate it and give a name to the vastness and infinite, to understand the ruptures and fissures of the earth, the thickness from which life is born, and, most importantly, to become landscape as in the poem: to lose one’s consciousness while becoming-flower, earth, the Cosmos. (8) Zumthor reveals his procedure to access this sensual or molecular perception: “I have to love the earth and the topography. I love the movement of the landscape, the flow and the structure of its forms; I try to imagine how thick the humus is; I see the hard bump in the meadow and sense the big boulder underneath all the other things I don’t know very much about, but that give me a wonderful feeling. (…) And when I build something in the landscape, it is important to me to make sure my building materials match the historically grown substance of the landscape. The physical substance of what is built has to resonate with the physical substance of the area” (Zumthor, 2017, p. 99).
Although not a lodestar to Zumthor, his description of the projects made for the Poetic Landscape resemble the photographic series Mimesis (1972-73), by Barbara and Michael Leisgen. The German artists noticeably pay homage to Caspar David Friedrich in their work, being the latter’s painting Morgenlicht the main starting point for this series. In Mimesis, the silhouette of Barbara Leisgen appears in the middle of the photograph, emphasising the landscape’s components through gestures and postures. In some photographs, she is stretching her arms in different positions and degrees, to hold the sun around her, or create a vessel to the clouds, or point the meeting of two mountains in the horizon, or follow the contours of the undulating countryside. The body becomes a territorial mark within the landscape, transforming the latter’s components into expressive elements. Plus, in the space of the photographs, these form territorial motifs or characters to which the body pays a homage with a song made of postures, gestures, colours, and sounds (we hear the mountains’ echo through Barbara’s body as she embodies its vastness and majesty). The artists refer that their action pretended to mimic nature’s language through the body. “In a time without words the coercion to behave mimetically was enormous. Reading clouds, stars, the sun, mountains and dances is reading beyond language. (…) The faculties to resemble and to behave similar are faculties of man. (The attempt to imitate is always magic, too)” (Barbara and Michael Leisgen, 1974). However, we recognise the composition of a melodic landscape formed by territorial motifs (when the artists operate a selection of nature’s components - moments of inversion of patterns, points of tension or confluence, fissures - they are turn these into matters of expression, and then, through their mise-en-scène in territorial motifs), and territorial counterpoints (i.e. the postures and gestures of Barbara’s body). “Reading beyond language” reveals an attempt to trace a territory (which implies the emergency of expressive qualities) through the becoming expressive of rhythm. In the series of photographs, this rhythm also augments, expands, contracts…
Looking at the German’s couple photographs and Zumthor’s drawings and models of the Poetic Landscape projects, the resemblance becomes evident. Zumthor might not be familiar with the formers’ work, but an identical understanding of the landscape and nature is recognisable, probably because Zumthor also proceeds in a similar way to Land Art artists. He makes several expeditions to the site, spending long periods walking, collecting and documenting singularities, including the passage of time and the chaos that nature embodies (for example, perceived in the light of a place). These expressive qualities will be metamorphosed into the work’s composition to create spatial sensations (the house’s planes). Among several descriptions provided by Deleuze & Guattari, a sensation is a bloc of affects and percepts, that might also be described as territorial motifs and melodic landscapes, respectively. It is through rhythm that these form compounds of sensations, and determine becomings. “But it is not just these determinate melodic compounds (…); another aspect, an infinite symphonic plane of composition, is also required: from House to universe. From endosensation to exosensation. This is because the territory does not merely isolate and join but opens onto cosmic forces that arise from within or come from outside, and renders their effect on the inhabitant perceptible” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, pp. 185-186). The sensation fills a territory - the house, postures, colours - while simultaneously evokes and embraces cosmic forces. Of course, there is a continuity between sensation and cosmos as they belong to the same impulses that gave origin to territorial characters and melodic landscapes, traces of an original chaos.
In the Poetic Landscape project, Zumthor unconsciously inherits the poets’ approach (albeit each artistic form proceeds with its means, they share a vision of the landscape), creating a rhythmic and polyphonic landscape filled with territorial motifs and counterpoints, where the space between buildings is just as important as the buildings themselves. The operating distances belong to rhythm. The buildings serve as landscape’s counterpoints. They do not belong to the landscape, but rather create a landscape within themselves where the former is kept as vibrations, forces, and sensations. The Poetic Landscape will constitute itself as an aesthetic approach to the landscape-architecture relationship not from the point of view of function (shelter or inhabiting), but as an assemblage or, as Deleuze and Guattari name, as a refrain. “We call a refrain any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes (there are optical, gestural, motor, etc., refrains)” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 356). The landscape no longer refers to a specific landscape, but to the melodic landscape produced by territorial motifs and counterpoints. And poetic refers to the rhythm that belongs to the compound of sensations.
In 2011, Zumthor completed the Steilneset Memorial to the Victims of the Witch Trials in the Finnmark, located in Vardø, where we recognise the production of a Poetic Landscape just as it happened when the architect designed the Bruder Klaus Kapelle. At the exhibition held in Kunsthaus Bregenz, in 2007, it was possible to read in the description of the Poetic Landscape project: “But then the district government changed from one party to another, and the project died. Did it really? Perhaps not, as it is still showing signs of life.” (9) It was a rhetorical question as the architect was just finishing the Bruder Klaus Kapelle. In his latest monograph, Zumthor confirms it: “The stock of architectural images I dreamed of and worked on for this project [Poetic Landscape] later found expression in the Bruder Klaus Chapel in Wachendorf in the Eifel” (Zumthor, 2014, vol. 3 / p. 12). However, Zumthor is thinking here of the similarity between forms attained for both projects - the excavated mass within an organic and sinuous internal enclosure and a straightforward and clear-cut external form — that he afterwards attributes to Brigitte Labs-Ehlert. (10) Indeed, the forms are unquestionably similar, but the question of form is secondary. It is the Poetic Landscape as an aesthetic theory and a form to trace a territory (following Deleuze & Guattari) that allows this proliferation of built works as we witness again in the Steilneset Memorial.
Vardø is an island located in the Barents Sea, north of the Arctic circle, where the land meets its end and we feel earth’s curvature and nature’s power so strongly. During the summer, the days are endless while, during the winter, the sky is of the darkest blue as a constant night, only punctuated by the lights in the streets and in the houses’ windows. Every house has a light suspended at the window to lit at nightfall according to an ancient tradition (a gesture Zumthor repeats inside the memorial, which we also find in Sigurd Lewerentz churches). The island’s terrain is a continuous carpet of rock, grass, small flowers, with the buildings standing in between. There are almost no fences and the houses have a direct relationship with this geological and topographical stratum. Some of the buildings even have informal green roofs camouflaging themselves in the landscape. And there isn’t any tree at the vast open horizon. Only the infinite horizontal planes of earth and sea. The community is mainly dedicated to fishing and related industries, and while walking around the island to enjoy its extraordinary nature (in the very way of the northerners), we may still find the old wooden structures used to dry fish.
The memorial stands above the terrain through a wooden structure similar to those to dry fish, allowing the natural untouched landscape to flow underneath: flowers, rocks, stones, empty sea urchins houses. It perpetuates the walking through the landscape, however changing the sensation. In the composition of sensations, there are always thresholds of intensity - when a sensation reaches a limit and changes its nature (for instance: the perfect balance or its immediate fall) - and, in the memorial, these coincide with the ones of the entrance and the exit of the building, as a long walk through the northern landscape already took place (and a person is already immersed in the landscape). Albeit being apparently symmetric, from whatever side we reach it, the sensation changes by the very act of crossing the space. The entrance, independently of the side, is marked by the heavy door (clearly understanding the door as a threshold, Zumthor always pays extreme attention to the doors and all their details: how our hand grasps the handle, the movement that the door describes when we push it or close it, its weight, the texture of the materials mixed with the time of use, and the time of nature, etc.) and once inside the dark corridor, it’s difficult to go back. The memorial becomes a sheltered passage or a dark tunnel in the middle of the northern icy landscape. Its form inherits the quality of its material: it is a flexible textile form, stretched and fixed on the wooden structure that sways with the constant coastal winds and breezes just as the suspended lights inside. The milieu’s components - the terrain, the walking, the suspended lights, the wooden structure, the wind, the colours, the exquisite birds - are metamorphosed into matters of expression. Instead of framing them, the building uses them as expressive qualities in its aesthetic composition.
Inside the Memorial, the atmosphere is silent and quiet. It is a concentrated and saturated space, where the black canvas (an artifice that Zumthor creates again in the 2011 Summer Serpentine Pavilion, and, in former projects, we may identify with the double wall or corridor that envelops the internal space, preparing the body before inhabiting) abruptly cancels the visitor’s senses so that she or he gradually concentrates on the rhythm that belongs to the building itself. This rhythm composes a polyphonic landscape where we recognise the territorial motifs or rhythmic characters (the matters of expression created by Zumthor after his selection of the landscape’s singularities) and to which the window-light devices (and it’s important to observe that these don’t follow any order or cadence), the suspended silk cloths (where the visitor can read the story of each one of the ninety-one victims), the elevated wooden floor (that seems to float), and the visitor’s own steps and reading pauses belong to.
Inside the memorial, the silence becomes expressive (what denotes the composition of a spatial sensation), and we are envisioned with a melodic landscape. Zumthor kept the presence of nature’s elements inside the tunnel. We hear and feel the wind, the Arctic's icy cold, the cries of the seagulls and the birds flying in circles, the waves crashing against the rocks. The tunnel is crossed by nature, by all its elements. As in John Cage’s 4’33’’, all the subtle differences of sound in the interior increase the attentive listening of our bodies, because the space forms an envelope for the body, at the same time making the body concentrate on all the subtle sounds coming from the exterior, in their intensive bodily presence. This dichotomy between external and internal space (and we should notice that many of the openings are unreachable to the visitor’s eyes, so the presence of the exterior happens mainly through hearing) pays an important role in the composition of silence as a spatial sensation. Writing about the Poetic Landscape projects, Brigitte Labs-Ehlert notices: “Who enters the building arrives in an optically closed, but atmospherically open space to the surroundings. The landscape cannot be seen from here, but light, noise, temperature, humidity, and smells penetrate the interior through the fine-meshed cavity walls” (Labs-Ehlert, n.d.). Deleuze and Guattari point, precisely, to the sonorous quality of the refrain. In this case, the refrain results from the transformation performed by the bloc of sensations (a coupled sensation of silence and contemplation): a visual sensation is given through hearing - what happens whenever we are in the presence of a melodic landscape.
Vardø model, Peter Zumthor. Courtesy of the architect.
The sound of the landscape has always been present in Zumthor’s memorial as a matter of expression. One of the models made represents Vardø during the Winter with the terrain transformed into a flat icy surface as if covered in snow. The buildings are dark to contrast with the white of the terrain and the memorial’s solitude and dignity, gently perched on the ground. As it happens with several Zumthor projects’ models, the model holds a sensation or compound of sensations within itself. Sometimes this sensation is close to the one that the built work sustains; other times it is another sensation that, notwithstanding, defines an atmosphere or an expressive quality of the built work. In this case, the model becomes a sonorous plane and, contrary to what happens in the memorial, is the visual image that produces a sonorous landscape (we hear the ice cracking and the vibrations and resonances that echo in the landscape through the model).
Zumthor’s memorial is the stage-maker’s mise-en-scène, the refrain that captures nature in its most intense expressiveness, assembling it in a different way (nature as ready-made, as Deleuze & Guattari would point out). It’s the melodic composition of nature’s joy and despair. It’s a performance when we cross the tunnel perpetuating a continuous movement through the landscape that ties up the whole island. It’s a chaosmos: a Poetic Landscape.
Notes
“Perhaps art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 183.
Translation by the author.
“The same terms are used to describe ice deserts as sand deserts: there is no line separating earth and sky; there is no intermediate distance, no perspective or contour; visibility is limited; and yet there is an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of both). It is a tactile space, or rather ‘haptic’, a sonorous much more than a visual space,” Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 421. Jean-Philippe Vassal was born and raised in Casablanca, Morocco, thus, he had already developed a bond with Africa during his childhood.
There are also other elements and singularities which also enter into the plane of composition of the small hut: the materials, the use of these as objets-trouvé, the Tuareg nomad tent, the space as a form of gathering and, of course, the rituals and celebration. All these take part in Vassal’s becoming-desert.
Peter Zumthor, lecture presented at the 9th Literature Meeting, Schwalenberg, 21 January 2001; consulted at Zumthor’s büro (December-February 2010-11).
Years later, Zumthor admits it on his compendium of Buildings and Projects edited by Thomas Durisch. “The Poetic Landscape project opened new spaces for me, new spaces to think about the connection of architecture to landscape and the creation of buildings that serve less a practical purpose than a spiritual need,” Peter Zumthor, Peter Zumthor. Buildings and Projects 1998-2001. Volume 3 (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2014), 11.
“Castañeda illustrates, for example, the existence of a molecular perception of which drugs give us access (but so many things can be drugs): we attain a visual and sonorous microperception revealing spaces and voids, like holes in the molar structure,” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 251.
The process of becoming (devenir, in French) as defined by Gilles Deleuze is an a-parallel evolution between two ideas, an encounter between two heterogeneous entities that form a bloc irreducible to either of the terms. As he explains to Claire Parnet, in Dialogues: “Les devenirs ne sont pas des phénomènes d’imitation, ni d’assimilation, mais de double capture, d’évolution non parallèle, de noces entre deux règnes. (…) La guêpe et l’orchidée donnent l’exemple. L’orchidée a l’air de former une image de guêpe, mais en fait il y a un devenir-guêpe de l’orchidée, un devenir orchidée de la guêpe, une double capture puisque “ce que” chacun devient ne change pas moins que “celui qui” devient. La guêpe devient partie de l’appareil de reproduction de l’orchidée, en même temps que l’orchidée vient organe sexuel pour la guêpe. Un seul et même devenir, un seul bloc de devenir, ou comme dit Rémy Chauvin, une “évolution a-parallèle de deux êtres qui n’ont absolument rien à voir l’un avec autre”. Il y a des devenirs-animaux de l’homme qui ne consistent pas à faire le chien ou le chat, puisque l’animal et l’homme ne s’y rencontrent que sur parcours d’une commune déterritorialisation, mais dissymétrique. C’est comme les oiseaux de Mozart: il y a un devenir-oiseau, les deux formant un seul devenir, un seul bloc, une évolution a-parallèle, pas du tout un échange (…),” Gilles Deleuze in Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 8-9.
Consulted at Zumthor’s büro (December-February 2010-11).
“The germ cell of the design for the Bruder Klaus Chapel can be found in the ‘poetry houses’ (individual structures designed to relate to a specific poem) I had worked on two years before in the context of the Poetic Landscape project. It was only later, after the chapel was built, that Brigitte Labs-Ehlert, the author of the Poetic Landscape Project, pointed out the similarity of the spatial innovations in both projects.” Idem, Ibidem, 121.
Bibliography
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Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1994). What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles; Parnet, Claire (1996). Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion.
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