Why / how:

Architecture, both modern and old, and urban planning played a big role in my family's life growing up. When I later graduated from my BA art studies in London, and what was then called Conceptual Studies, I included my childhood home in my graduation thesis, which consisted of an exhibition and a written dissertation - 'Of Space and Anxiety – an Inquiry into the Uncanny of Memory'.

The house built in 1972 was a project that experimented on many levels. Without a doubt, the architects played with the boundaries of private and public space, with social and design elements, and was inspired by English terraced buildings in terms of form. The materials consisted of part glass and part brick in what felt like a 40/60 proportion.

In my art practice, the threshold between body and skin, and craftsmanship, and psyche and materials has been quite fluid and has therefore meant a lot. In my attempt to understand the concreteness of architecture as an extension of identity, as well as an attempt to define the caring object (parents) in a child's formation of identity, I sought in the study an understanding of the physical impact of architecture on the formation of the psyche, which in its unknown magnitude can be perceived as the uncanny. I therefore exchanged the concepts of mother-object with architecture-object in a radical attempt to understand the 'idea' of the other or the other in myself.

IN WE ARE THE TIME, architecture has been partially replaced by urban planning, but the principle is the same. How we, in our journey, interact with and interact with the city and the planning of the city, as an integrated and caring part of ourselves. Not as an object in and of itself, but in a form of extension of ourselves. What we remember about the city is not an objective quantity but a

subjective mapping of the movements we experience in our journey through various cities, which is why in WE ARE THE TIME I included both real and imaginary levels to show the fusion.

The artistic framework was quite practical and almost instructive. In addition to drawing an overall basic drawing (a form of blueprint) that simply consisted of a square, I then divided this overall field into nine subordinate fields (substories), where each field was an autofictional city I had visited at some point in my life. Each field was inhabited by two fictional main characters who alternated between being either two girls, or a boy and a girl. If one girl was the narrator in the first story and the other girl the object of the story, the same girl would be the object of the story for the other person, girl or boy, in the next, and so on.

The novel WE ARE THE TIME is a kind of reverse coming-of-age story written as nine fragments where the characters at the beginning of the novel move in a spiral from the outermost field (being older) towards the innermost (see drawing), being younger. In addition, the motivation for structuring the story fragmentarily is a desire to simultaneously activate and emerge, an underlying blueprint or story through the reader's own associations. I tried to make this appear in a form of topographical overlay of individual areas (sentences, repetitions, topics) from each field, by dropping backward and forward-referring reference points to other fields. The reason for this was to create awareness of the reader's own underlying associations and images, which as a layer in the topography actively create their own story (based on the connections formed from the fragmentary reference points) which, like the basic drawing of a house, becomes the blueprint, i.e. the unifying element, for the overall story that for the individual reader is the novel.

The back cover of WE ARE THE TIME can be read via my website by clicking on the link. *Image of a house plan drawn by the Sumerians on clay approximately 5,000 years ago

© Camilla Howalt