13.3_Materiality and Simulacrum

The cave has been the site of the confrontation of nature, technology, and simulation in various contexts throughout history. The anachronistic “otherness” of cave architecture invites its interpretation as a skeuomorph-in-reverse: architectural forms stripped of their structural function and transposed to a more “primitive” medium as ornament. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rock-cut chapels and dwellings found throughout the Mediterranean provinces that were once part of the Byzantine empire.The repurposing and/or evocation of the cave as architecture in the Byzantine world is insufficiently understood in terms of pragmatism or symbolism. The proliferation of rock-cut architecture was a deliberate cultural choice that invoked material locality as a form of provincial resistance and self-determination, operating though formal modes may be defined in terms of ideas derived from postmodern cultural theory: namely the simulacrum and the “formless”.

Fieldwork for this project was conducted in Pantalica (Sicily), Cappadocia (Turkey), and Lakonia (Greece) to address thematic issues of representation: how does a representational type (sketch, orthographic drawing, 3D model, point cloud, photography, video) reveal a different ontology/epistemology of the cave? Which types of representation does the cave resist and/or thwart, and which have been historically favored?