The Unhomely Prototype

Sergalio

Karabo Moumakwe

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The Unhomely Prototype seeks to visual depict a collision of two lived and fictional experiences, one (of Huda Sharaawi’s biographical account) to the other (of Amina’s fictional and filmic account in Palace Walk and Bayt al-Qasryn respectively) by proposing a joint narrative/script. This script informs the spatial characteristics which will attempt to distort Amina’s lived experience contribute to the experience of feeling ‘unhomed/uncanny’, guided by a card framework (The Double, Manifestations, etc), which is informed by theoretical framework of Sigmund Freud’s uncanny (1990) and Anthony Vidler’s unheimlich (1992) particularly in the home-place.

As Karel Deckers mentions that the unheimliche’s agency ‘is that it does not create novelty but rather re-creates something that already existed’ (Deckers, 2015, p.126) and concerns the ‘unravelling [of] a multitude of layers in which architecture is hidden and can be excavated’ (Deckers, 2015, p.126), the Unhomely Prototype proposes 3 composite drawings (mise-en-scenes) and scripts which a pair will align with the aforementioned instances Amina experiences. As Deckers also alludes that the ‘re-creative workings of the unheimliche allows a triple vision of an idealized past, present and uncertain future…’ (Deckers, 2015, p.92), the composite nature of these drawings experienced as single instances or renditions, attempt to parallel Amina’s domestic experience with the ancient harem (through rituals, testimony and artefacts), to subvert and morph gendered spaces and to compound Amina’s ‘flânerie’ to the shrine as a hypervisible woman.

The Unhomely Prototype proposes multiplicity and doubling of experienced time and geographies (the harem in the home) to not only unsettle the protagonist, but also as commentary on the residual architectures and gender dynamics that, through vanished time, haunt and affect our experiences today.