Patience in Placemaking

Description of Activity

Dance and everyday living could be said to be a set of performative events that engage with the act of living and living well. Through the practice of inhabiting a place, we continually arrange and rearrange everyday artefacts such as food, tables, chairs, photographs or pebbles on a beach, this rearrangement provides a sense of settled-in living where spaces are produced through everyday actions. In this way the production of space shifts, from the abstract thinking of the architectural drawing board and design studio to the practice of living – to everyday actions, artefacts and materials. The clean line of the architectural pen and roll of white paper is replaced by drawings/actions/movements that assemble and rearrange material relations. Shifting the language of architecture from, boldness of design to the immensity of the ordinary and everyday.

Feminist philosopher Karen Barad argues that, “representationalism ... separates the world into the ontologically disjunct domains of words and things…” Architectural representation and its production processes are sedimented with binary thinking such as male/female, inside/outside, subject/object. Architectural drawing practices perform through a particular set of actions that are sedimented with abstract thinking. They engage with respresentationalism through distance and separation.

Patience in Placemaking explores alternative modes of knowing through caring, connecting, moving, drawing and making. This workshop invites participants to engage with an expanded drawing/moving practice to rethink representational methods within architecture to create vocabularies of care with which to make the built environment. It asks, how might repertoires of inhabitation that incorporate movement rhythms, routes and repetitions inform the cultivation of place and architectural methods of placemaking? And how might language and materials perform to create everyday sites of affect – spaces of care?

Period	26 Oct 2023
Event type	Seminar
Location	Portsmouth, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International