Belly: a fragile place to think with
The voice in my belly gets louder when I think about architecture, not from a gluttonous desire to build and mark the world through my imagination, but from an anxious spasm that makes me ask: is architecture good, or is it a devil?
I remember Cixous’s words as she laments the time before the violent divorce between good and evil: “All was mingled then, and no mistakes. Only desire, trial and error. Trial, that is to say, error.” My belly hurts again when I imagine an architecture of error; she feels lonely in a world of heroic architectures that claim to save the world.
In a world full of desires to pick, dig, build, erect, there is no space for the kind of trial and error in which my belly could situate.
From writing from the belly of late-liberal monster, falling into the sinkhole
Dorothy falls and Alice falls, but into other worlds of magic and strangeness. Adam, Lucifer, Humpty Dumpty, and Icarus fall to less desirable ends. These figures of the construction called masculinity attempt to rise to power and fail, lose, fall from grace. The feminine ones drop out, fall down the hatch, use the exits, find the dreamworld of condensation and displacement, strangeness, and délire. The position to take is perched on the rim of the hole, at the moment the trap door closes, ready to fall. Not to fall from, but into. The fall from is hierarchical and you can hurt yourself. The fall into is labyrinthine, dreamy, a dancing fall, a delirious fall. Bloomer, 1993, 162
This walking deliberately avoids following a rational path for theorizing and imagining architecture, since a rational path leads back into familiar territories. Instead, it begins from a curiosity that trails the relation between obruk (sinkhole) and obur (gluttonous), allowing this etymological and material entanglement to orient where and how I move. Interestingly, the French verb “engloutir” (to swallow up) shares the same root as “glutton,” further reinforcing this entanglement between consumption and co-lapse in Karapınar. A gluttonous person is known for their big belly. The resemblance between the form of sinkholes in a landscape and bellies may seem like a curious coincidence, yet it unsettles my thinking and opens questions about spaces of gluttony, desire, and harm in this troubled world. Therefore, my path opens toward the belly.
Through the entangled story of agriculture, energy infrastructures, and architectures that materialise the late‑liberal governance of the ground in Karapınar, I am beginning with two rookie purposes: staying with the trouble on a ground full of holes, and perching deliberately on its rim, not to fall from it, but to fall into the sinkhole.
I am not falling from the ground; as a woman with a belly, chora is my place. I have never had a stable ground to hold me, but through my belly I have been the ground. That is why, when the ground starts to shake to give birth to a sinkhole, instead of running, I perch on its rim and fall into it.
Similar to how Alice imagines she might reach the centre of the earth while continuously falling down, down, down through the rabbit hole, I, too, expected to arrive at magma; instead, when I closed my eyes and my hands left the ground on which I was perched, I found myself arriving at my own belly. It is my belly that is stuck between the belly of a late‑liberal monster and herself, as a figure for doing theory from within the sinkhole’s socio‑geological materialities.
Belly is about digesting, breathing, gestating; it is a messy world, showing your belly is showing your vulnerability but also writing from the belly, being part of the very system I am talking about—late‑liberal governance all over my body, my thinking, my belly.
The body is, in a sense, a multiply constituted hatchery. It is a messy assemblage of flows—organic, libidinal, synaptic, psychic. The metaphor for the throat, the primary entrance portal—is the hatch, as in “down the hatch.” This hatch is a door or passage. We describe our bodies and our constructions in terms of each other, with words as passages between one and the other. Writes of passage, hatcheries all. The hatchery is a bridge between the sacred and the voluptuous, between physis and techne. Bloomer,1993, p.161
In this dissertation, I take the sinkholes of Karapınar both as a material-discursive condition—through which late‑liberal governance, agriculture, infrastructure, and architecture intersect—and as a figural ground for thinking about architecture’s responsibility, and thus architects’, educators’, and researchers’ responsibility, to be accountable to vulnerable landscapes.
More specifically, I ask how “architectures of extraction through extractions of architecture,” accompanied by isolated, disciplinary knowledge, participate in the late‑liberal governance of the ground, and what kinds of inter‑disciplinary ways of imagining architecture otherwise might help us conceive an architecture that stays with the trouble rather than resolving or covering it over. I develop “belly architectures” as a figuration for ways of designing, imagining, and dwelling that foreground vulnerability, interdependence, and responsibility, and that stay with unstable, perforated grounds instead of asserting mastery or control over them.
I imagine my belly as a place from which to think architecture ethically, not merely through its first connotation of sheltering (pregnancy) but also through digesting (through the soil) and breathing (through the air), in order to endure the conditions under which its production digs into and draws out materials by contaminating the soil, and under which its spatiality pollutes and alters the air.
Therefore, in Karapınar, I trace not only architectures of extraction—those structures that enable groundwater withdrawal, intensive agriculture, and solar energy production—but also the extraction of architecture itself, as designs, materials, and knowledges are pulled out of their relations to land and community and circulated as detached expertise.
As my belly has been seen by the patriarchal system as merely a potential place to shelter a legitimate child after marriage, I resist imagining architecture only through building, and instead insist on its other capacities for digestion and breathing.
Barnacles, engulfings, underminings, intrusions: a [MINOR ARCHITECTURE], collective, anonymous, authorless, scratched on the city, the landscape, hatched not birthed. (They are illegitimate—without father.) Bastard constructions. (In some human societies, there is no concept of legitimacy. One is legitimate by virtue of existence. No one knows a single father; many males are the nurturing fathers of all children. Children are born of the mother; they are legitimate by virtue of having made the passage from inside to out.)Bloomer, 1993, 162
In this journey—from sinkhole to belly—I hope to explore other ways of being an architect: not a gluttonous one who designs and builds despite the cost to others, but one who thinks and imagines from the belly, searching for “belly architectures,” soft critters that hold the potential to become nodes of disruption within late‑liberal governance. Belly figuration thinks with Bracha Ettinger’s notion of the prenatal co‑emergence of subjectivity as a condition that enables empathy, compassion, and responsibility for others, through the experience of carrying, or being carried by, another (Ettinger, 2006).
As mentioned earlier, the belly is a multifunctional space, depending on whose belly it is, transforming its spatiality through digesting, breathing, and gestating. In this text, these three embodied actions become the organising threads for my inquiry: digesting, breathing, and gestating orient how I read and write architecture from the belly. Through three different architectural stories that each focus on one of these actions, I aim to narrate a reading of architecture from the belly, attending to how through architecture different bodies and landscapes are extracted from, exhausted, and yet still made to carry the labours of sustaining worlds across shifting power structures that I, following Povinelli, understand in the present under the rubric of late‑liberal governance.
Insatiable desires of digesting
In 1988, Hejduk’s House of the Suicide and House of the Mother of the Suicide were encrypted in the architecture building at the Georgia Institute of Technology, crippled by indecisive (unfunded) incompleteness for years. This condition of incompletion was testimony to the ability of the profession to lock up the house and swallow the key. But these incomplete objects were further marginalized: they remained to stick in the craw, consumed but not digested, irritating the system. They were always there, par-tial and worrisome. Bloomer, 1993, p.17.
Spaces of gluttony, desire, and harm remind me of the story of Erysichthon, a mythical Thessalian noble whose name means “earth‑tearer” in Greek. When Erysichthon designed a large banqueting hall for himself, he decided he needed the finest timber to build beams that could span openings of that magnitude. The sacred grove of Demeter, goddess of agriculture, was perfect for finding what he needed. He went into the forest with his people and cut down an ancient tree, despite Demeter’s warnings.
Demeter was responsible for cultivating and nourishing, so she could not punish him herself, as it was against her nature, but she called on the goddess of Famine for this task. Famine cursed him with an insatiable hunger for food that grew even greater the more he ate. He ate and ate, consuming all his wealth, and even began to sell his daughter Metra as a slave in order to obtain more food. When Metra was about to be sold as a slave, she begged the god of the sea, Poseidon, for help, and he gave her the ability to change her appearance. She became a fisherman, saved herself from the slave trader, and returned to her father, but his hunger kept growing. He sold her many times, and each time she transformed herself into something else to escape.
This continued until one day Erysichthon began to eat himself and died. Metra was then finally free and went into the forest as a deer. After living in many years as non-human, she turns human finally to face when her father did to sacred grove. In Mary Oak O’Kane’s version which she uses the story as a way to show ecological devastation we are experiencing today and completes the story with others to imagine more hopeful ways to care the land today, Metra, once is very devastated to destruction her own father did, chose to stay with the trouble with this vulnerable landscape, devotes her life to care and heal.
The myth of Erysichthon is often discussed as an allegory of how human desire for consumption ultimately consumes the self in environmental studies. Although it is impossible to ignore the moral narrative of punishing gluttonous consumerism, as an architectural researcher, I find myself preoccupied with the fact that his initial aim was to build a large banqueting hall, and that he designed this massive space in a way that required the finest and strongest timbers. Iason Stathatos cleverly connects Erysichthon’s story to the origin of architecture, as for him it has always been related to environmental crisis, disease, and hunger. For me, it is also a story about showing the architect’s gluttonous desire to build at the expense of others.
Jealousy of gestating
Like Erysichthon, this desire sometimes results in self-destruction. In Peter Greenaway’s film The Belly of an Architect (1987), Kracklite, a renowned architect from Chicago, is invited to Rome to design an exhibition in honour of Étienne-Louis Boullée, of whom he is an ardent admirer. In the opening scene, we see Kracklite and his wife, Louisa, having sex on the Italian border, his massive belly dominating the frame and visually staging his inflated personality and ego. When Kracklite starts to work on the exhibition, he becomes obsessed with the story of Caesar Augustus, who was poisoned by his wife through eating a fig she served him.
In the Garden of Eden there was no architecture. The necessity for architecture arose with the ordination of sin and shame, with dirty bodies. The fig leaf was a natural first impulse toward architecture, accustomed as it was to shading its grotesque fruit. Was it the fig tree that was hacked up to build the primitive hut?Bloomer, 1993, 166
He begins to develop conspiracy theories that his own wife will poison him with a fig and pushes Louisa towards a younger Italian architect who is already interested in her beauty. When he starts to feel stomach pains, his obsession with bellies becomes extreme: he prints out hundreds of images of the bellies of male statues, while pointedly refusing to look at Louisa’s pregnant belly. It is possible to read him as jealous of Louisa’s capacity to create life, suggested by his refusal to look at her belly even when she tries to show it to him. The nine-month exhibition schedule overlaps with the duration of her pregnancy, staging an uneasy parallel between architectural production and gestation.
Throughout the film, Kracklite’s and the other male architects’ egos clash, producing constant conflict as his health deteriorates. In the letters he writes to Boullée to tell of his troubles, he persistently signs off as “architect,” even when he is about to receive a devastating diagnosis, revealing how vital this title is to his sense of self. While he appears relatively unconcerned with Louisa’s affair and even encourages it, he cannot stand to see his exhibition handed over to the young Italian architect, who becomes its curator. His singular desire is to become the greatest architect by curating an exhibition dedicated to a prior “greatest architect,” and when this ambition collapses, undermined by Italian colleagues, he kills himself shortly after seeing that Louisa has given birth.
Among all the bellies the audience encounters, Louisa’s pregnant belly is paradoxically absent, kept at the margins of the visual field and the narrative focus. As a largely silent figure who tracks and accommodates the desires of architect men throughout the film, Louisa might embody what Elizabeth Grosz, drawing on Plato’s notion of chora, describes as an endless metaphorization of femininity: the condition that enables men’s self-representation and cultural production (Grosz, 1995). In Plato’s account, chora functions as a nurturing receptacle whose purpose is to hold, nurture, and bring into the world, without the recognized capacity to transform what it holds; for Grosz, this underpins a world in which women are confined to the domestic sphere, a space of messiness, constant care, and cleaning that remains unacknowledged and undervalued (1995). Thus, Grosz through Luce Irigaray’s philosophy, insists on the need to return women to the spaces from which they have been expelled, both to reveal the ways men have occupied and defined these spaces as “proper” for women, and to experiment with other possibilities for dwelling, occupying, and living.
Restriction of breathing
Air, that which brings us together and separates us.Which unites us and leaves a space for us between us.Irigaray, 1996
Once again the lung seems the most appropriate organ for the Anthropogenic climate change era because it points to the openness of all beings to their surroundings. Povinelli, 2016
Breathing: drawing the air into our lungs all the way down to the belly, allowing it to expand; then, as we release our breath from the belly, it becomes smaller and smaller, until it mixes with the outside air as it leaves through our mouth.
While corsets and stays that reshape the torso, compress the ribs, and limit breath were welcomed and applauded as representations of how a woman’s body should look in 17th century, belly pads, which became popular among women in London in 1793, were mocked and condemned, born of a deep fear that women’s bodies might act outside social expectations. In 1793, when fashionable women in London began wearing belly pads, hoping to resemble classical female statues and their draped silhouettes, they ended up appearing as though they were pregnant or fat. This unsettled many male observers, who caricatured and decried the trend out of fear that it might conceal an illegitimate pregnancy or unwanted “fatness,” and thus render women’s bodies less legible and controllable. If the corset demanded that women literally tighten their breath in order to appear properly contained, the pad suggested an unruly belly that might have eaten too much, enjoyed too much, or gestated without permission.
As Charlotte Goodge argues, the female pad‑wearer came to signify a woman acting autonomously, prioritising her own desires over social expectations that demanded strict self‑restraint in every sphere, from appetite for food to sexual desire.