Fragments series by baka studio investigates architecture as unconscious symptom
Architecture, traditionally defined by its function and form, is reinterpreted in Fragments by baka studio as a mirror of psychological tension rather than spatial resolution. This series of seven short-form visual essays does not aim to solve spatial problems or fulfill utilitarian needs.
Instead, it asks: what if architecture itself were a symptom of the human psyche? Through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, Fragments displaces architecture from the role of passive container to active projection, revealing how built forms can manifest inner contradictions, traumas, and desires.
Each episode of Fragments engages with concepts such as repression, narcissism, void, lack, and desire, not as thematic decorations but as structural logics. These essays operate in a liminal zone between cinematic short, theoretical reflection, and curatorial artifact.
The work employs a hybrid methodology: AI-generated images interface with meticulously human-modeled architectural fragments. These pieces neither suggest complete buildings nor advocate a formal agenda. Rather, they render visible the unconscious mechanics of space.
The architectural fragments that emerge in Fragments are not representations but dislocations. A self-obsessed geometry mirrors itself in endless reflection, a looped surface turning inward in narcissistic recursion.
Meanwhile, spaces marked by repression collapse their thresholds, erase their access, or bury meaning beneath an uncanny silence. In the register of desire, objects become partial and suspended, resisting resolution. These are not expressions of identity or function; they are symptoms of psychic residue made spatial.
The visual essays avoid the traditional language of architecture. Instead of drawing or rendering a building, Fragments speaks in dream-like compositions, speculative diagrams, and annotated overlays.
The results resist coherence. This deliberate fragmentation invokes Lacanian psychoanalysis, where the Real remains inaccessible, and the Imaginary and Symbolic fracture under pressure. Architecture in this vision becomes a field of projection, a terrain of unconscious expressions rather than material answers.
By positioning space as a site of psychic inscription, Fragments challenges the dominant paradigms of architectural representation. It suggests that form is not just formal, and function not just functional. Space carries the weight of internal narratives, distortions, and unresolved drives. The built environment is thus not a neutral backdrop for the human subject, it is the subject, shaped by and shaping the psychic life of its occupants.
The work of baka studio operates as a hybrid field of symbolic interactions between environment and architectural technology, blending materiality with digital, the primitive with the future, human-machine and artificial identity. Founded by Giorgio Castellano, baka studio continues to challenge architectural conventions through its psychologically charged spatial investigations.
https://www.instagram.com/baka_studio_architettura/
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