A Collective Consumption

To those who read,

Call me Rukshan. Some time ago after several months of speaking of it, I was encouraged or more precisely coerced through the encouragement of my friend Winston to submit my first piece for the Paprika publication he was editing, “Just What the Doctor Ordered: Health and Architecture.” Since then, I have been fortunate enough to continue writing for Paprika! over the years since graduating in 2020. And it has been fantastic to see more and more people getting involved with the associated arms of the publication for Volume 07 under the leadership of Christopher Pin, Claudia Ansorena, and Saba Salekfard.

Presented to me, “Pure Devouring” is a curious document. The editor’s note by Brunno Douat and Juliana Biancardine unravels itself as almost a sober initiative invitation to one of those yet unnamed Yale clubs, where you are first made to eat human flesh before you are allowed to enter into secret association with the other acolytes. The winding words of the fold, as I perceive it, surround and define the borders of each piece, and yet they consume each other to the point that they exist in a zone between being illegible text and abstract symbols. It is also interesting to see how dark halos on one side and large geometric cuts on the other interrupt the creases that frame each submission at different angles. It was very fun to have this publication present with the coming of Halloween last month.

Prof. Kenneth David Jackson imitates the issue with “Anxieties of Devouring in Antropofagia” that positions the cannibal critic of this issue as not just a recent provocation, themed for the month of October, but as the continuation of struggles that have existed in revolutionary movements extended back to 1928 and even beyond to 1554. It makes me wonder what the readers of this issue will now produce from having come in contact with this document, and where we will end up in this continuum.

Katie Colford, Do You Read Me? (2): “Definitional Divergence: Architects vs. Everyone Else”
Paprika, noun
Architects
· Not confining the creativity and enjoyment of an article to be bound by academia’s desire to beat students over the head with paragraphs of MLA and APA formats
Everyone Else
· Paprika. I put it on my plate

Devi Nayar, “Inhabiting Erasures”
A wonderful encapsulation of how the tides of European colonialism reshaped continents starting at the scale of a community and a family. From reading this piece, I am looking forward to seeing how these older traditions and relations to the world and the family emerge anew in this coming century. I feel as though I will return to this article as it rings with a familiarity that I cannot place just yet.

Jack Parham, “Macumba Antropófaga”
A story that emerges from a location that does not exist on a map, nor satellite photo, but from the memory of Jack Parham. This place is a palimpsest whose original meaning is lost, burned and weathered then rebuilt by masons and Bo Bardi—infected with time, afflicting all those with images that words can only hope to bind to the page.

Helena Ramos, “Clothes inside the body”
Living now in New York City where Hélio Oiticica once lived for a time, it is interesting for me to consider how the preservation of the parangolé as an art piece in MoMa preserves the physical object while erasing its tangible purposes. It remains as a rigid object, attached not to a body nor any other organic figure but to an Aristotelian solid made up of AR polycarbonate cylinder from a wall. Left exposed to the eyes, but beyond that invisible veil enforced by Museums of DO NOT TOUCH. I am thankful for this article for illuminating a remarkable world and time which too often the walls of institutions are too small to contain.

Isabel Baião Sanches, “Resistant materials”
For me this article made me wonder how the inclusion of the present visuals and imagery coupled with the text I have already read fit into this concept of the visual, the visible, and what maybe unintended visions it may then produce in the expanse of people who have come in contact with this issue.

Gabriel Biselli, “Pampulha #01: autochthonous research in review or spicy penguin stew”
A veritable smorgasbord that provides some fascinating insights, and some very enjoyable quotables. “Theory as fried food, tasty but a vice to be avoided” remains one of my more favorite lines. The extended citations provided some wonderful context, though the flow of the article could have been helped with their integration into the main piece to help ease in the readers.

Andrew Economos Miller, “War Machines”
Really wonderful article tracing the thread of this birth, destruction, and rebirth of the world through the appetites of Renaissance theorists through to the need to confront the established power structures of architects through creatures and creations not of their own making or control. Also, Andrew speaking of war machines, you owe me 50 copper ore in Valheim for helping you take down that troll.

Dilara Karademir, “Whose furniture is this?”
“Food transcends the modern boundaries, nations and geographical thresholds between continents of people.” A few months ago I moved away from my family whom I had been reunited with after an absence of several years, to a city I did not know nor ever planned to end up in. Thinking of home left a hurt in me that only a phone call could abate, but only for a short while. Feeling the need to be home, without being able to go there I made my way to a small restaurant far out in Queens called Dosa Hutt. The trip took several hours to make and when I arrived there was nothing familiar to me from what I could see. However, as I sat down and began to eat, that distant feeling — those hundreds of miles that separated me from my family — collapsed into that mere distance between my mouth and my hands.

For this list of contributors, it is encouraging to see those from beyond the concrete confines and Paprika-ridden underbelly of Rudolph Hall incorporated into the fold as a part of this issue. I thoroughly enjoyed the publication and my hopes are that the contributors of this issue continue to write, and those that read feel inspired by these pieces to start writing articles of their own.
All the best,
Rukshan