Embodied Landscape – Maryam Muliaee

In the absence of things, our imagination is provoked; the mind fills the gap and void with new, different versions of the vanished, obliterated or lost. Think of demolished buildings or ruined architectures: How can we re-imagine a lost place?

Embodied Landscape is a multimedia project that reflects on the history of a lost and forgotten architecture in Buffalo: The Marble Temple. Built in 1913 for M&T bank’s former headquarters, the White Marble Temple once was an iconic building in Buffalo with four stories high and the interior finished with splendid white marbles. However, the building was demolished in 1959 and its marble columns have been partly preserved: some now stand at Baird Point next to Lake LaSalle on the University at Buffalo’s North Campus (dedicated as a memorial to servicemen and servicewomen), while the rest remnants of the columns remain in Buffalo’s Outer Harbor, in different locations in the site of Wilkeson Pointe Park.

Embodied Landscape uses film, dance, music, poetry and locative media to suggest a meditation on the idea of architecture as something fluid, and mediated by the poetic interpretation and performance in the site. The video captures a sensory and tactile encounter between different bodies and builds an imaginary, filmic landscape through the juxtaposition and sensory contact between the female body with the white marble stones.

An old postcard showing The Marble Temple built for M&T’s headquarters in Buffalo

ruins from the Marble Temple
© Maryam Muliaee

still from video — Naila Ansari dancing with the marble stones ©Maryam Muliaee

locative media – mobile app interface design

see the interactive work from this project here