The Brooklyn Rail

In Relapse, the penultimate number of Erin Cuevas’s Ouroboros, three dancers appear suspended within a field of projected digital images. Striped vertical lines mark each body. As they begin to glide up and down the thirty-six dancing poles installed in the Everson Museum of Art’s lower-level gallery, the lines contort, producing languid contour maps across the surface of each warped figure. Linework drifts past the figures and gallery walls and spills onto the ceiling above. For several moments, the waffle slab appears as though it is beginning to melt.

Over the first weekend of November in Syracuse, the I.M. Pei-designed gallery has become a living media apparatus. The audience sits in two shallow rows of black folding chairs lining both sides of the main axis. At the two opposing walls capping its end, three projectors each map strobing light from their lens onto the wall opposite. Between their gaze, they capture the figures of three dancers within an evenly spaced field of thirty-six dancing poles, each spanning comfortably from floor to ceiling as though providing necessary columnar support. This evening’s event is not a slick studio production but a resourcefully assembled operation by a former architectural fellow at Syracuse University.

The room’s composition evokes something between a catwalk and a French formal garden, characterized by axial geometries, non-hierarchical field conditions, and the shifting one-point perspective extruded through the lens of each projector. The performance is a high-octane situation of contour maps, digital media, and axial compositions. Cuevas herself casually describes it as “hardly architecture at all,” though I beg to differ. Deeply unconventional, conceptually ambitious, and resourcefully assembled performances like this represent the hopeful future of architecture, a discipline fractured by ideological, environmental, and technological shifts.

The title of the work, Ouroboros, describes the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail, evoking cyclic time and the inseparability of life from death. The performance, produced by Cuevas alongside choreographer Vickie Roan and composer Kurtis Sprung, follows a series of seven chapters intended to narrate key moments many face when undergoing trauma. Cuevas names these chapters pulse, diagnosis, treatment, catharsis, recovery, relapse, and pulse (again), freeing her audience to interpret the deeply personal nature of the physical or psychological trauma endured. Through this cyclical, embodied narrative framework, Cuevas sets out to confront the architectural subject from the beginning. Architecture is “supposed” to be cerebral: to defy time, to elude impermanence, and to resist fragility. In setting out to produce this work, Cuevas sketches an alternative, emergent sense of architectural time. One which is non-linear and necessarily embodied. One which is unafraid of wandering and getting lost, of losing track of itself completely. One which is willing to address the uncertainty and instability of life itself.

Ouroboros negotiates seemingly contradictory and simultaneous extremes—at once deeply personal yet visually spectacular, smooth yet ad hoc, digital yet embodied—to elude any of the bins into which we eagerly desire to sort new work. As an architect trained at the University of Southern California and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and with recent experience as a design director at Nike, Cuevas’s project pulls together several interdisciplinary concerns and narratives: media architecture, an examination of theater typology, and, in her own words, a feminist “reclamation of the historically objectified pole-dancing body as a force of spatial authorship, empathy, and resistance.” Some in her audience, many of whom are designers affiliated with Syracuse University’s School of Architecture, might read Cuevas’s project as occupying an optimistic pocket of creative terrain trapped ten years in the past. Through her interdisciplinary foregrounding of digital media above the conventional tools of the architect, we are reminded of the promises of digital architecture during the first decades of the twenty-first century. These promises were largely foreclosed by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent COVID pandemic, or at least retreated to a handful of universities in Los Angeles, London, and a few European capitals. Ouroboros imports Cuevas’s computationally fluent, West Coast perspective for an audience comfortable in the more conservative intellectual climate of the Northeast. And yet, through this act of translation, Cuevas’s hybrid work feels indelibly characterized by its absence of self-conscious nostalgia for anything at all, least of all the techno-punk attitude of the late ’90s and early 2000s. Digital media is leveraged not as an alternative design subject or ideology, but as a set of tools thoroughly saturating what it means to live and practice architecture today.

What’s at stake in Ouroboros is subversion at multiple scales. For the bodies of her dancers, to whom Cuevas affectionately cheers throughout the performance, who subvert the historically objectified practice of pole dancing to practice spatial authorship, empathy, and resistance. For I.M. Pei’s iconic building, whose structural grid is effortlessly transgressed by a field of dancing poles that import lowbrow cultural practices and a liberated feminine sexuality, topics historically believed taboo by the architectural old guard. And for Cuevas’s own project, which powerfully resists the expected output of an architectural fellow at Syracuse University, it is bravely ignorant towards any fear of melting down the stable form of our discipline, opening it to outside histories and practices. May we all be so fearless in our refusal of the anticipated and obsequious. It might be just what this climate demands.