Losing Myself
July 2016
Film by Lez Barker of Art AV
Irish Pavilion at la Biennale di Venezia 2016.
Yeoryia Manolopoulou and Niall McLaughlin
Losing Myself is the Irish entry to the Biennale Architettura 2016. The project is a collaboration between Niall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou, exploring dementia, architectural representation and the contrast between the architect’s intention for a building and its subsequent inhabitation. For more information, visit losingmyself.ie.
The title of our project, ‘Losing Myself’ is drawn from the principle that architects have a responsibility in our designs to imagine the experiences of others. We have tried to develop a process of drawing through which we can imaginatively inhabit the minds of people with dementia, whose view of the world is not immediately clear to us. The drawing presents the fragmented and overlapping perceptions of people with dementia, rather than a representation of the building as a static architectural object. The installation imagines the ways in which dementia might affect an individual’s ability to synthesise and navigate their environment, based upon our observations and our conversations with experts and people with personal experience of the condition.