Session #126

– Paper Presentations –

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.[1]

Feminist philosopher Karen Barad argues that, “representationalism … separates the world into the ontologically disjunct domains of words and things…”[2] 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. This call invites papers on expanded drawing/moving practices within architecture/interiors/dance/fine art/geography/archaeology, contributions that settle architectural/design practice amid everyday life and intra-act with surrounding ecologies.

Patience in Placemaking explores alternative modes of knowing through caring, connecting, moving, drawing and making.[3] This call asks, what forms of practices, actions and tools can be used to create vocabularies of care with which to make the built environment? How might repertoires of inhabitation that incorporate movement rhythms, routes and repetitions inform architectural perspectives on placemaking?And how might language and materials perform to create everyday sites of affect – spaces of care?

[1] Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Indiana University Press, 2009), 174.

[2] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Illustrated edition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 137.

[3] Casey, Getting Back Into Place, 174.