The script The Uninhabitable of L. B. was first written during an Aphids residency with MUSiCLAB in Brussels, as a result of the month-long collaborative project Scale. The residency took place at the former public bathhouse and swimming complex now called Bains::Connective. Through enquiry into the local history of the building, and into the architectural history of public baths, there emerged a fictional character known as L. B., a newly retired teacher of Classical history.

A text of fragments, some ‘found’, The Uninhabitable of L. B. attempts to render the subtle counterpoint of the mind—ways in which the mind can magnify or miniaturise impressions from past experience, and bring them into strange, deeply personal coincidence. An architectural vocabulary marks gradual shifts in L. B.’s interior space from distress to relief, and to positive expectation. At one level the work is a story of healing, an opportunity to ‘overhear’ the associative logic through which one woman, unnoticed in a public place, acknowledges her existential fragility, retrieves her composure, reclaims her unassuming joi de vivre.