Since we are not having an architectural cuff class next week, I wanted to contribute these experiences of architectural cuffs that I've had over the semester. There is something about architectural cuffs that have helped me with the cuff as a concept and how it might be different from other notions, like pockets.
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An architectural cuff occurrs in spaces such as elevators. A turn in perception that brings about an awareness of being temporarily entangled with co-occupants. This shifting takes place for me in the pauses that are passed between people and things. The silence speaks of actions and events that have led each actor and actant to be within this particular catchment. Sharing each others respiration, the scent of coffee and a cheese sandwich, the lingering warmth of someone who has already been repelled from this cuff only to converge in another, or perhaps in a pocket.
A cuff, like a pocket, has an opening and a fold where things converge, but these convergences are without the intention of preservation or safekeeping. Convergences in pockets, through often haphazard, are mostly intentional. Things are placed in pockets. Sometimes things dwell in pockets indefinitely.
Most of the rooms in ones home become architectural pockets where things are set in arrangements, to be held in ever-changing associations. The convergences that take place in pockets remain, more or less, for a purposeful and extended stay. In contrast, the things that fall into a cuff, its lint(ing)s, are temporary and indifferent associations. Clothing cuffs are places where lint forms. In these folds, the loose fibers, dust, hair and crumbs of a textile converge and commingle for a time. Its not as though pockets don’t have lint but that cuffs don't have things placed in them.
Anatomical cuffs are the bellybuttons, armpits and ear canals of the body but a vagina is a pocket. Architectural cuffs, such as elevators, are places where bodies on different trajectories temporarily and incidentally converge, so are public bathrooms. Similarly, sexual cuffs are a temporary arrangement based on conveniences of geography and schedule. They are not for keeps though they take advantage of pockets.
Similar indifferences can be seen in a disciplinary cuff. A slap that is meant to knock sense into one that is possibly too young or naive or dog to get the point, but a purpose is rarely given with a cuff of this kind. The cuff is the point. Its convergence is the lingering affect of bewilderment and confusion rather than guidance, comfort or direction. In its indifference, a cuffing generates convergences of indiscriminate kinds. The convergence of the world being the cuffing of an indifferent universe. Otherwise, the worlds continuous coming into being would be a pocketing.
Magnificent, Donna.
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