Eija Loponen-Stephenson

Peter Gnass’ Fountain was erected in 1984 originally as part of a larger children’s’ play area in Montreal’s Square Viger. While the other play structures were removed in 2000, the fountain and its invitation for playful engagement remain. I imagine the poles in their unfastened verticality as a support structure for a home. Their form mimics both the internal framing of a house and scaffolding which clings to a buildings’ exterior while it is under construction. The fountain’s simple wall-less figure refuses the viewer the ability to decern whether they are inside or outside of the structure as they walk through the maze of poles.

In the mid 1800’s Max von Pettenkofer, a German physician and the self-proclaimed father of experimental hygiene, conceptualized the dwelling as a skin that envelops its inhabitants. It was his life-long project to outfit every home with breathing walls which mimic what was thought to be the respiratory function of the human skin. Thinking about breathing walls I remember the first time I saw the film footage of Martha Graham’s 1930 performance of “Lamentation”. This is a double partner dance though the archives label it as a solo. It is a strange and pensive negotiation between flesh, cloth, and architecture. Graham is encased in a tube of jersey cloth and is seated on an invisible extension of the stage’s black box. The forms created by these three actors are beautiful and unworldly chimeras, body-structures that are at once human, cloth and architecture but also none of these. This performance exaggerates the haptic feedback bodies experience when interacting with their architectural and textile surrounds. It is play without narrative which generates tens of thousands of sculptures in 8 minutes and 13 seconds.

When I first happened upon Gnass’ Fountain I saw a house with no walls, a stage, an invitation for collaboration, a structure waiting to be danced. The Breathing Walls performance documentation captures 4 human bodies at play in the fountain all wrapped in cobalt blue cloth. The procession of bodies weave the fabric between the fountain’s poles creating an architecture which folds into itself, a home which refuse stasis or frontal orientation. A house with no walls is a house where everyone is welcome but that nobody can own. The cloth is in tension between the beams of the fountain and the human bodies creating soft walls for the dancers to lean and push into. At times the dancers become completely enveloped by the opaque cloth and the boundaries between skin, textile, and architecture become obsolete and new body-structures emerge.