Oceanic interiorities

Author: Sarah Treadwell Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 16 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge, 2018) Raw file: raw/chapters/treadwell_2018-oceanic-interiorities.md

Summary

Treadwell's chapter (the sixteenth of Marinic's Interior Architecture Reader) argues that the sea is "the most extensive interior that we confront": to live in the South Pacific is to be "conscious of the watery nature of interiority," since we carry salt water within us (sweat, tears, blood) and are absorbed back into it (the collective of death). The chapter constructs "a written image of the space of the sea" — oceanic spatiality woven from Epeli Hau'ofa's sea of islands, Philip Hoare's daily swimming, Teresia Teaiwa's critical edge, Ruskin's immobilized watching, Turner's Slave Ship, the tsunami statistics of Aceh/Japan/Samoa, and Hélène Cixous's tidal mourning — and lands on the claim that "every domestic interior is, in some senses, oceanic": liquid (steam, moisture, emissions), permeable (doors, windows, sound), navigable, and measured in tears, sweat, blood, and breaking waters. Oceanic interiority is maintained by "permeable membranes (skin and shore) that permit separation while allowing connections at individual and global scales."

Key Claims

The salt-laden oceans "constitute the most extensive interiors that we confront, and on which we depend" — the sea re-defined as interior, not exterior, landscape.
Because we have the sea within us and fear immersion (in the collective) in death, "the sea is envisaged… as a spatial condition that epitomizes our vacillations between individuality and collectivity."
Interiority is watery: Hau'ofa (quoting Teresia Teaiwa) — "We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood"; Hoare's northern-ocean swimming confirms the "recurrent references to an interior relationship with the sea."
"Such oceanic interiority is maintained by permeable membranes (skin and shore) that permit separation while allowing connections at individual and global scales" — the membrane, not the wall, is the oceanic boundary.
"The immersive interior is, in one sense, a uterine space; a space of beginning that endlessly repeats the ordinary dramas of life and recognizes an exteriority within that cannot be expelled."
Hau'ofa's "Our Sea of Islands" reverses the Western image of isolated small islands: Oceania is "an expansive liquid terrain" navigated by skill — stick charts recording "geometries of the surface of the sea aligned to time"; and pre-European "Boundaries were not imaginary lines in the ocean, but rather points of entry that were constantly negotiated and even contested. The sea was open to anyone who could navigate his way through." The sea is "porous, map-like, narrated, and figured."
Hoare's sea surface is unreliably ornamental: "The horizon is only an invention of our eyes and brains"; the sea "takes color from the clouds, becomes a sky fallen to earth"; yet "The sea defines us, connects us, and separates us."
Teaiwa ("Lo(o)sing the Edge") makes the ocean an instigator, not just recipient, of history: the islands of Kiribati and Tuvalu "may not exist in thirty years' time. 'The ocean has the edge'" — sea-level rise as the edge holding itself, not being held.
Ruskin's childhood watching (via Rosalind Krauss) constructs the sea as neutral compensation for enforced restraint — "a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, into the no-space of sensory deprivation"; in adulthood the same sea turns to blood in his account of Turner's Slave Ship ("incarnadines the multitudinous sea"), the sea as "a container of all the detritus and rejected things of the world."
The tsunamis (Aceh, Japan, Samoa) show the sea as "an implacable leveler" whose washing-away "rendered all equivalent" — and as "the instigator and repository of loss and mourning."
The culminating domestic claim: "Every domestic interior is, in some senses, oceanic, being liquid (steam, moisture, and liquid emissions are constantly resisted) and permeable (cut through with doors and windows and sound)… the domestic interior is oceanic in the tears that flow: sweat forms, blood falls, and waters break over the difficulties and pleasure of everyday life."
Method claim: "To write is always to construct an interior, through familiarity and estrangement, and to write a pattern of oceanic interiority has been both an act of mourning and a collaborative, formal undertaking" — "the extracted interior space being poised between the poetic and the accurate."
To swim is "to form, momentarily and warily, a collaborative relationship with the medium while still maintaining our breathing selves. To undertake oceanic writing is to recall and enact that collaboration" — writing as the swimming of thought.

Connections

Concepts: oceanic-interiority (the chapter's own concept), sea-of-islands (Hau'ofa, via Treadwell), interiority (the watery register), inside-outside-dialectic (skin and shore as permeable membranes; the horizon as "imitation closure"), intimate-immensity (the sea as limitless expanse and sameness; the ocean as the largest interior), embodiment (immersion, floating, buoyancy, the swimming body), domestic-interior (the domestic interior as oceanic: liquid, permeable, navigated by tears), poetic-image (the "written image… poised between the poetic and the accurate"), boundaries (pre-European sea boundaries as negotiated points of entry, not imaginary lines), liminality (the littoral, the edge), sublime (Melville's "divine Pacific zones the world's bulk about"), repetition (the uterine space that "endlessly repeats the ordinary dramas of life"), uncanny (the deep-water unknown beneath the ornamental surface).

Authors: treadwell-sarah — marinic-gregory (editor of the source volume). Cited but not paged: Epeli Hau'ofa, Philip Hoare, Teresia Teaiwa, Rosalind Krauss, John Ruskin, Hélène Cixous, Robert Smithson, Herman Melville (see log PAGE NEEDED entries).

Debates: climate-change-and-architecture — the ocean as "instigator and participant" of history; drowned and disappearing island states.

Related source notes: The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (Bachelard 1958/2006) — osmosis between intimate and undetermined space, radicalized to skin and shore; Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — Ruskin as the immobilized child-watcher, "the sheets merge into seas"; The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — suspension and time held by a space; Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the edge as negotiated in-between zone, here littoral rather than architectural.

Direct Quotes

"Water covers approximately seventy percent of the earth's surface. The salt-laden oceans constitute the most extensive interiors that we confront, and on which we depend." (Ch. 16; pagination not marked in the raw file)

"To live in the South Pacific is to be conscious of the watery nature of interiority."

"We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood." — Teresia Teaiwa, quoted via Hau'ofa's The Ocean in Us

"Such oceanic interiority is maintained by permeable membranes (skin and shore) that permit separation while allowing connections at individual and global scales."

"The immersive interior is, in one sense, a uterine space; a space of beginning that endlessly repeats the ordinary dramas of life and recognizes an exteriority within that cannot be expelled."

"Boundaries were not imaginary lines in the ocean, but rather points of entry that were constantly negotiated and even contested. The sea was open to anyone who could navigate his way through." — Epeli Hau'ofa, "Our Sea of Islands"

"The horizon is only an invention of our eyes and brains as we seek to make sense of that immensity and locate ourselves within it." — Philip Hoare, The Sea Inside

"The sea defines us, connects us, and separates us. Most of us experience only its edges, our available wilderness on a crowded island."

"Is it possible to have an edge on the world's largest ocean?… The islands of Kiribati and Tuvalu may not exist in thirty years' time. 'The ocean has the edge.'" — Teresia K. Teaiwa, "Lo(o)sing the Edge"

"Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth." — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

"The sea is pictured as 'opening into a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, into the no-space of sensory deprivation.'" (Krauss, via Treadwell)

"Spreading guilt has replaced water's virtues of cleansing and purifying."

"The sea is understood as a container of all the detritus and rejected things of the world."

"Statistics cannot remain dry in such circumstances."

"Every domestic interior is, in some senses, oceanic, being liquid (steam, moisture, and liquid emissions are constantly resisted) and permeable (cut through with doors and windows and sound)… the domestic interior is oceanic in the tears that flow: sweat forms, blood falls, and waters break over the difficulties and pleasure of everyday life."

"To write is always to construct an interior, through familiarity and estrangement, and to write a pattern of oceanic interiority has been both an act of mourning and a collaborative, formal undertaking."

"Containing anxieties, rising waters, and detritus, reflecting desire and the passage of time, the sea repeats the interior passage of life born and ended."

Open Questions

If every domestic interior is "in some senses, oceanic," what would it mean to design an interior from its oceanic properties (moisture, permeability, tears) rather than resist them — is Treadwell's claim a phenomenological description or a design program?
Hau'ofa's negotiated "points of entry" in the open sea (via stick charts) and Borden's thick edge both refuse the boundary as fixed line — is the littoral the thick edge's largest scale, and what does the oceanic register add that the urban register misses?
Treadwell's written image is "poised between the poetic and the accurate" — can an interior-architecture method be built on writing (cf. Hedges's waiting drawing), and what would oceanic drawing look like?
The sea holds "an exteriority within that cannot be expelled" — does this invert Bachelard's interior immensity (immensity within) into an immensity that refuses domestication, and does it support or strain the intimate-immensity account?