Critical Spatial Practice

Climate Change, as intrinsic to, and entangled with, the “Great Catastrophes” of the Plantationocene, Anthropocene, and Capitalocene, is fueled by and operates along lines of race, class, and gender. In response to processes of dismemberment and dissection that we experience under the condition of the colonial present, we will assemble and ground together on Thursday April 14th at 4pm (Palestine time) to lay fertile ground for connections to be made across our shared geographies.

Along the line of the so-called “fertile crescent” we will meet across Iran-Turkey-Palestine, learn from each others’ landscapes and practices, and share thoughts and ideas. Located online, but situated within our respective environments, we welcome participants from within and outside Palestine, Turkey, and Iran to join this student-led meeting which will be hosted at Al-Quds Bard College.

Our speakers:

Farimah Jamali
Pelin Tan
Mazin Qumsiyeh

moderated by Mahmoud Salem

Register here:
https://alquds.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYsfu2spzkpGtYDYD1DDNm1OLev58HqmHsc

Authors: Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti
Photographic Documentation: Luca Capuano
Contributors: Jad Tabet, Sari Hanafi, Ismae’l Sheikh Hassan, Pelin Tan, Ilana Feldman, Khaldun Bishara, Suad Amiry, Thomas Kenan, Foad Al-Laham, Nasser Ramadan, Osama Jafari, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Rasha Salti, Paul B. Preciado, Elias Khoury, Khalil Abu Laham, and Eyal Weizman.

Cities in the biblical text are not mere places, but often also characters in a relationship with both human beings and the divine character. Critical-spatial theory has offered a valuable framework to connect these two roles of the city, introducing a functionally informed understanding of space rather than one that is either material or symbolic (Lefebvre 1974; Soja 1996). This chapter builds upon this research, whilst proposing a stylistic component to the framework in order to assess the nature of the textual city fully. Relying on metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980 [2003]; Kövecses 2010) and framing theory (Entman 1993; Fillmore 1975), the chapter shows how city space is construed in the biblical text. This space tends to rely on a handful of frequently used conceptual metaphors, such as the city is a container and the city is a woman, and less commonly used images, such as the city is an object. Only in exceptional cases does the text turn to novel metaphors that differ significantly from the well-established city imagery. The actual cityscape in the text is the result of a skillful tailoring of images into a specific context.

Making Futures Bauhaus+ is an action research project that addresses questions of architecture as a collective form and architecture as a resource. Departing from these two perspectives, it operates as an experimental research unit that advances future paths for architectural practice and education. It was initiated in 2018 as a cooperation between raumlabor and the Berlin University of the Arts on the occasion of the Bauhaus’ centenary.

The newspaper edited together with Fiona Shipwright was received by every participant and visitor at Haus der Statistik.

Both a learning platform and a pedagogical experiment, Urban School Ruhr is built upon the foundational belief that experts and amateurs can, together, build a space of critical exchange and knowledge transfer. USR prioritises exchange and dialogue that is not necessarily attached to specific outcomes, results or interventions in built reality, instead understanding conversation as the first step to co-producing cities.

Explorations in Urban Practice, the first edition in the Urban School Ruhr Series, draws from and reflects upon USR’s experiences to date whilst also looking to the future of urban practice in contemporary cities. The book presents the reader with key current questions in the field: how can we learn city making? How should we understand the political concept of commoning for this purpose? And how can we discuss intervention as a strategy for enacting urban change?

With contributions from: Juan Chacón, Dirk Baecker, Merve Bedir, Pablo Calderón Salazar, Bianca Elzenbaumer and Fabio Franz, Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius, Silke Helfrich, George Kafka, Valentina Karga, Gilly Karjevsky, Hannes Langguth, Laura Lovatel, Torange Khonsari and Andreas Lang, Marjetica Potrc, Anna Giulia della Puppa, Julia Udall, Sam Vardy, Sabine Zahn.

Published by dpr-Barcelona

>> Shortlisted for the Cornish Family Prize for Art and Design Publishing at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

The article argues that a transversal instituting practice in contested spaces and zones of borderlines is possible despite necropolitics developed through the destruction and construction of spaces by hegemonic agencies. The borderline of southeast Turkey that many patchy infrastructural projects proceeding in urban spaces and the zones of borderlines produce spaces of necropolitics. Decolonial practices in art and activism against the necropolitics are having diverse coherent forms of performance, de/archiving, artistic&architectural work as critical spatial practices.

This article reflects on a practice-led and Katutura-based intervention Operation Odalate Naiteke to explore how notions of performing and curating can be employed in mobilizing public art and trans-historic work. I relied on Oudano and other African concepts of performance such as Dala, to argue for an expansive and care-driven approach to curating and organizing radical education in the public sphere. Specific projects such as What is the Sound of Katutura in 1971? and Okapana Mobile Concert demonstrate the intersecting trans-historic and care work in the public sphere. The artistic work by Ouma Paulina Hangara, Lamek Ndjaba, Lovisa the Superstar, Maspara Pantsula, Ten Ten, and Trianus Nakale is discussed to make these connections between performance, publicness and the curative. Operation Odalate Naiteke as a radical education programme that facilitates site-related, trans-historic and trans-generational dialogic action through alternative publics situated on the margins of dominant and centralized public culture.

Exhibition: Brief Histories, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Curators:  Fawz Kabra and Isak Berbic
"WINTER/SPRING 2011 BRIEF HISTORIES brings together contemporary artworks and contributions responsive to the unfolding events and larger circumstances and global happenings during the period of the so called Arab Spring in the Middle East. The WINTER/SPRING 2011 exhibition was momentarily materialized (the production of "physical presentation copies" were realized by the organizing artists group) in the intimate setting of a home in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, as well as posted online for wider circulation. Participants contributed photography, installation, drawing, text, philosophy, video and web-based projects. Themes lying within their contributions reflect upon social geography, power and authority, labor and capital, private and public space, and the media. With telepresence of information, temporality has transformed from its traditional linear progression (past, present, future) to a coexistence of past and present–on demand. In this respect media networks broadcast multitudes of distinct perspectives, which in turn destabilize any possible definitive narrative."
http://briefhistories.blogspot.com

FieldWorks launches with an online interdisciplinary symposium that explores art and design practices in the public and civic domain. It takes the form of conversations with leading researchers whose innovative projects span local, national and international perspectives. They are joined by staff and students in the School of Arts.

My doctoral examination exhibition titled Performing Spatial Labour
(2019), and the four performance-installations it assembled, catalysed a
praxis of ‘spatial labour’ to render previously invisible labour and spatial
conditions not merely knowable, but ‘sensible’ (Rancière). Spatial labour,
as developed through my practice-based doctoral research (2016-2020),
incorporated architectural practices and building actions related to
the ‘making up’, ‘making real’ (Scarry), and making sensible of spatial
conditions. I employed architecture’s primary instruments—drawings,
models, and texts—reinterpreted performatively to give precedence
to the actions that call forth space or produce its ‘(un)becoming’1. I
leveraged spatial labour to explore invisible spaces and forms of labour
(in)activity associated with two sites of internment. The first of these
were demolished WWII-era Japanese American internment camps in
the US where internees wove camouflage nets, fabricated scale models,
and moulded bricks. The second was the razed Centre d’Identification
de Vincennes (CIV), a detention centre in Paris from the Algerian War
period used to prevent the interned from working.

The exhibition immersed visitors in a multisensory milieu
that choreographed their forensic 2 (Gibson, Weizman) labour to make
sense of the (in)visibilities within and of architectures of interment
as evident in the four exhibited performance-installations: Intern[ed],
States of Exception, Palimpsest and Razing Manzanar II. While the
exhibition spatialised traces of these performance-installations, it also
hid material, embodied, and affective labour, including acts needed
for the exhibition’s (un)becoming—orchestrating, sourcing, procuring,
forming, assembling, and recycling materials. The labour itself was
obfuscated by its visible outcomes. Yet it was through not only the
visible evidence of past labours, but also the visitors’ more-than-visual
experience of the exhibition and their embodied detective work that the
camps’ recurrence and invisible-ised labourers became sensible.

1. I define ‘(un)becoming’ as both the less-than-beautiful quality of things or
spaces when coming apart and, through parentheses inflecting this and other terms, recurrent oscillations between states.
2. Drawing upon Eyal Weizman and Forensic Architecture’s practices, ‘forensic’ practices include seeking and uncovering truths, engaging artifacts’ expressive potential, and bringing evidence to the forum (Forensic 746-8). In Gibson’s practice, the gallery visitor is a ‘forensic audience… looking to construct a worldview’ (104-5) and a viewer-investigator in motion (135-6).

This paper sets out the socio-spatial practices of PS2 and Street Society in territorialised, post conflict Northern Ireland – whose work combines pedagogical and improvisation theory to prototype distinctive social models. These practices were formed by a continual process of practical involvement and reflection (through writing) and evaluation (funding permitting), alongside the author-practitioners' search for theoretical concepts that would bring clarity and an alternative perspective to the processes and outcomes. Concepts and approaches taken from pedagogical theory and, uniquely in the case of architecture, improvisational theory, will be used to explore critical aspects of the specific practices, and more generally assert that such socio-spatial ‘street pedagogy’ offers a space of rehearsal and ultimately, a site for the development of socially-just aesthetics. The paper thus proposes a theoretical scaffolding for practices which increase diversity and diminish resource consumption in the contexts of climate emergency and a politics of precarity.

The fragmented land and sea of delta host several types of labor conditions. The common known factory labor is the migrant labor from mainland China that flowed with the establishment of manufacture and tech-production centers in the opening of the Pearl River Delta region.  In recent years, there is a transformation of economic surplus from manufacturing to construction and real estate speculation that leads to delta infrastructure and service economies. Farming and fishing labor still exist and are squeezed along the coast in-between investments.

field research funded by Hong Kong Design Trust, Hong Kong, 2016
Documentary: https://vimeo.com/153393892

Stories on alternative teaching practices, decolonial methodologies of research, and the production of tools of learning and engaging with the world around us in ways that are non-extractive and regenerative. Recipes and potions that bring forward stories, histories, and wisdom of care of our bodies, social, and ecological environments.
Contributors: Silvia Federici, Lisa Brock, Elizabeth Hoover, Rebecca Yoshino, Dalida Maria Benfield, and others.

Edited by Pelin Tan & Malkit Shoshan / New York
Illustrated by Michael Leung / Hong Kong
(Hosted by Woodbine/NY. Hosted by Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR), Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College the Human Rights Program).

Lessons As Art, Intro Note - Editor: a meditation on Palle Nielsen's A Model artwork and the role of pedagogy in contemporary art.
On The Breakdown Break Down - interview with Brett Bloom
taisha pagget : A Movement Of Technicolor People - Interview
Supercuts - notes on lesson planning by artist/educators  Sarah Ross, Ryan Griffis, Carol Zou, Caroline Wollard, and Jennifer Moon.
Ephemera Corner- The Center For Tactical Magic

Critical Practice Notes is a low-fi print-only newsletter, available through the US Postal Service. It lays somewhere between mail art and art writing. The letter contains unique writing, essays, interviews, and ephemera. The letter explores the nature of a critical creative practice in the era of cognitive capitalism.

Contributing across the domains of open transdisciplinary inquiry and transdisciplinary- and practice-oriented architectural and urbanism research engaging critically with participation in urban contexts, this research proposes critical indirectness as a multivocal design approach in participatory practice, developed through conceptual-analytical inquiry into three cases involving engagements between external art and design practitioners and public cultural institutions around participatory projects in Gothenburg.

It joins with calls for art and design practitioners' greater engagement with public sector institutions as way of working towards a more durable and wider impact, with calls to model a more de-centered 'urban-combinatory' practice on the plurality, hybridity, discontinuities, and contingencies of the contemporary city, and with calls for more multiple, contradictory approaches. Its methodological approach, open transdisciplinary turn-taking, likewise pursued these aims via alternating engagements between institutional and external actors, my own and others' practices, and theory from multiple fields.

The primary aim is to explore how art and design practitioners (including researchers and institutional actors) can develop greater capacity to critically wayfind within the complexities of engagements with public cultural institutions in and around participatory processes. This is supported by two interrelated inquiries, the first reworks monovocal understandings of participation, critique, institutions, and actors as multivocal—simultaneously collective, complex, and involving actors' critical and creative trajectories of agency. The second conceptualizes multivocal relations as having their own critical efficacy through potentially estranging effects, which can be both reflexively perceived by practitioners and furthered by design. These two inquiries combine in the use, in case analyses, of alternating voices, transversing voices, and wavering voices—conceptual-analytical lenses enabling focus on the critical and creative potentials of spatialities of multivocal estrangement generated by differential interrelations between 'voices'.

Em 1965, o artista norte-americano Dan Graham iniciou sua trajetória artística com a publicação de Homes for America, uma espécie de obra/artigo intervindo em revistas especializadas em arte. Nela estão presentes muitas das questões que definem toda a sua produção posterior e que também configuram um desenvolvimento particular da arte contemporânea, sobretudo em relação às pesquisas estéticas que buscaram superar as convenções, os códigos e as categorias que até então regiam a produção e o pensamento de arte. A obra seminal de Graham pode ser descrita como uma crítica à arte minimalista (produção de ponta naquele momento) e também à própria instituição de arte. Por um lado, o conteúdo apresentado intercala uma série de fotografias do artista sobre as habitações típicas dos subúrbios americanos (fenômeno que eclodira no país durante o pós-guerra) com textos descrevendo a lógica de produção e de organização espacial e formal das unidades, associando dessa maneira, o ideário estético do minimalismo (a objetividade e literalidade formais) com um contexto social real. Por outro, ao direcionar sua produção para o suporte das revistas, o artista estava questionando um aparato de circulação e valoração das obras de arte, trazendo à tona o funcionamento do espaço expositivo das galerias e museus como um sistema mais amplo.