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Stephanie Davidson: A Sensory Conversation

In Stephanie Davidson’s Disonancias 2006 project Urban Cushions, she continues to
develop an architectural mode of engagement which stresses the relationship between
bodies and buildings. This article explores Davidson’s tradition of making material
absent presences through architecture and ‘memory sculpture’. Urban Cushions,
an installation project which confuses the urban-domestic distinction also makes
actively present the ways in which bodies and buildings interact on an everyday basis.
For Juhani Pallasmaa, the role of architecture is “to make visible how the world touches
us” (1996: 1). Stephanie Davidson’s body of architectural works so far extends this role
by making visible how we touch the world, specifically the effects of bodies and
movement on the built environment. For Davidson, bodies are the objects of her works,
to which architecture is subject. As a result, present in her work are the absent-presences
of the bodies to which her works respond. Forefront in all of her work is the desire to create
a “sensory conversation” (InterArts app). Davidson’s architectural ontology is: making
visible the two-way relationship between bodies and buildings. This ontology is ever present
in her Disonancias '06 project-collaboration Urban Cushions.

Davidson’s collection of works highlights the everyday interactions between bodies and
built spaces. Davidson’s architectural forms make material kinesthetic relationships;
highlighting invisibilities of everyday life. These invisibilities are memories: of shared beds,
lost homes, moments of sitting, moments of dancing.

In her Disonancais 2006 project Urban Cushions, Davidson continues to make visible
the relationships between bodies and buildings through casting human impressions in
cushions. In this project, she actively produces a space in-between the urban and the intimate.
Like Painkiller Architecture and A Theater for Two, Urban Cushions provokes those in the
city to consider their engaged, embodied relationship to their built environment. While
Painkiller Architecture brought internal pain external and A Theater for Two likewise
infused an urban space with a momentary sense of intimate domesticity, Urban Cushions
creates a space that questions both the urban and the domestic. The cushions are hard while
appearing soft. They are common domestic objects displaced and materially transformed for
the urban environment. In this sense, Urban Cushions challenge what it means to be in the
city and in the home. They ask you to notice and to feel where you are. At the same time, in
her tradition of working with negative presences, Urban Cushions largely articulates the
presence of bodies in the urban. While traditional urban sculpture situates bodies as vessels
for looking at or viewing, this work acknowledges that human bodies in the city do more than l
ook- they feel, touch and are touched, they are highly specific and variable.

In all of her work, Davidson illuminates traces- fleeting moments, intangible memories are
frozen in sculpture or structure. In making visible traces of movement and presence through
her use of negative space, Davidson has continually created salient fodder for “sensory
conversations”. Urban Cushions continues in this tradition by actively capturing the invisible
surfacing of everyday life in the city, significantly the presence of bodies as beings. In this
dialogue bodies and buildings are both equally subject and object, touch and are touched.

Pallasmaa, J. (1996). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses London, Academy
Editions.
Huyssen, A. (2003). Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford,
Stanford University Press.

Tonya Davidson is a freelance writer and graduate student in Sociology at the University of
Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta Canada.