This week's class text was "Space is always Political - Melanie Dodd". This was a challenging text for me to read. I had to repeat paragraphs multiple times and after every section of the text, I took visual notes to try to connect and understand everything in the text.
This drawing represents what was happening in my head while reading the text. It started with the city, community, rules & order as well as interruptions. The city works in a certain way with rules and order where everything is interconnected by events, narratives, voices, occupation and infrastructure. "What makes space political is when an encounter becomes an interruption in the established order, the opening of a space for something other"..."The understanding that for space to have political import, it must rapture the existing order". It makes me think of how society is built up. We go to school all of our childhood to learn with an ancient educational system, meant to make good working citizens out of us. To follow the rules and order that our society has. It doesn't allow any interruption to the system, we have not been formed to think outside the box. We are stuck in a box consisting of work to earn money to live & to support the society we have. It is of course good to have some rules and order to things but we have been limited in the way we think.
"The city is an interrelated infrastructure of 'things'". Everything in the city is related to something else and we have an "ethically charged political landscape". There is no straight path which the red line represents. The little people along this line are doing different things as well and there are non-human things happening simultaneously along this path. We need to respect all things happening in a city and not only some 'things'. "Practicing space - 'spacing' - means negotiating countless intersecting paths where the focus is on a 'practices relationality', not conceiving abstractions which foreclose outcomes."
"The realms of art and architecture has been more recent but draws on desires for a more open-ended and socially engaged approach to the design of spaces." This allows for a more research-based practice with a focus on research activities as well, combining research and action that should be done 'with' people and not 'on' or 'for' people. Focus more on what everyone wants and let more people have a say in the designs happening around us, to be a bigger part of the whole process. It is described as "a 'place between' art and architecture" by Jane Rendell referring to an interdisciplinary terrain. Rendell came up with the term 'critical spatial practices', which "describes work that transgresses the limits of art and architecture and engages with both the social and the aesthetic, the public and the private."... "Awan, Schneider and Till (2011) take this further by constructing an argument for 'spatial agency' which, as a term, "proposes a much more expansive field of opportunities in which architects and non-architects can operate".
..." Rather than assume these forms and places of practice are sinister (they may well be), and to be avoided at risk of being co-opted by a neoliberal hegemony, we need to be more optimistic for the actions of spatial practitioners seeping into the institutional domains of planning ad development process. The urban renewal, can, with careful acts of design, act instead to produce provocative and questioning interventions that do quite the opposite - 'preform' the political through spatial practice. Only by confidently operating within the hegemony can we disrupt its operations from the inside out."
We chose seven words for this text as well mine were:
Human and non-human
Beyond
Interconnectedness
Challenge
Reconceptualised
System
Ethically
We were then asked to narrow it down to three words and find verbs for the three words.
Human and non-human Verbs: to exist, to interact, to live, to content, to embody
Interconnectedness Verbs: to interconnect, to come together, to link, to gather
Reconceptualised Verbs: to reconceptualise, to rethink, to visualise, to reassess
When we were done with this we were supposed to make a performance as a group where we chose a verb for each word and then used all the verbs we chose. A total of 12 verbs can be read in the picture above. There is also a diagram of how we wanted to move with these words.
You can see the movie HERE.
This was my first try because I missed last week's performance. I felt that we needed to use the space more than we did, use the things around us more and not only each other.
Exercise:
Drawing 1: two minutes taking everything in with all senses. No intention, nothing is more important. Five minutes eyes closed, pencil on paper, draw many things, visual memory, feelings, and see what happens when you just draw with the rest of your senses.
I wanted to capture the building that I saw in front of me with the corner right in front of me. What I observed before I drew was that the other buildings and the sky were reflecting in the glass. Another thing that I observed before I closed my eyes was that the plants around me were moving in the wind. While closing my eyes I felt the sun rays heating me from the left and the wind blowing from the right side. There was also one distinct sound constantly buzzing at the top right side of me. I figured out that that was the ventilation system and there was some sort of tripping noise coming from that as well. While closing my eyes it was dark but I could still "see" the sun shining and when there were birds flying past I saw a darkness going from one side of the already existing darkness to the other.
Drawing 2: Five minutes. Drawing what you can see. Eyes open.
I think you can see that I am not very good at drawing realistic drawings but I wanted to capture what I saw in my own way. I concentrated on trying to make the lines very well at the start but I did not have the time to draw perfectly so I continued to draw everything I saw in the reflection of the windows. The angles were distorted in the glass and the building went at a diagonal. Within that reflection of the windows of the diagonal buildings, I saw the clouds passing by. I was sitting in a corner of the slope going around the building. On the slope, there was much greenery growing everywhere around me. I even saw a few spiders crawling around next to me.
Drawing 3: Ten minutes. Eyes open, draw what you see but with the three words you chose.
Human & non-human, Interconnectedness, and Reconceptualised, how was I supposed to capture this in the view? I started drawing the surroundings quickly again and then I thought that the windows were reconceptualising the surroundings by seeing everything from a different perspective. Another way I reconceptualised the space was by walking on the little way in between the building and the slope. I walked around the handle and reimagined a new way to walk in the space. The Interconnectedness were how everything came together, the greenery where growing from one side to the other and connected one side of the path with the other. Hunam and non-humans are everything in the drawing, spiders, materials plants, me lying down, the buildings etc.
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