“Residual Intimacies, Allegorical Layers Towards a Poetic (mis)use - working title” builds its configuration from the expansive political and everyday interpretations of residual spaces, which I will use as a methodology to further complicate discourses around intimacy. Drawing on architecture and urban theory, affect and feminist theory, along with fictional writing, art and design installation, pop culture, literature, and autotheory, the thesis puts forward a mis-reading of intimacy as a site of encounter. I am proposing to complicate and expand the traditional, static, idealist, or often romantic associative vocabulary linked to intimacy that defines it as affection, confidence, familiarity, closeness, and trust.

What else is there, in these encounters in space, lingering without appearance? How does the broader context, political, social, and cultural, speak to the formation of narratives of intimacy? What escapes a reading through linear time? Rethinking intimacy calls for a fracture of its perception, an open wound where dents, cavities, and depression call for a dynamic relationship with its affective landscape. The performativity and happenstance of residual spaces, act as an insight to context surroundings across time. What is the intimacy of the residue? What are the attributes of residuality in the context of intimacy? If intimacy mimics material attributes of residual spaces, how does the conception of intimacy change, even deteriorate? This lyrical essay aims to only ephemerally take shape as a tentative theory of residual intimacies.

Author: Ioana Lupascu