happenings in space #4: oct. 26 - nov. 2, 2020
geopoetics in practice, queer spaces in Puerto Rico, the DNA of media art, new books on race and the non-human, the role of architecture in democracy, speaking monuments, and carceral architecture.
We’re reflecting on Anti-Aesthetic’s art and ecology exhibition in our essay Geo-graphing the Unseen, we’re thinking about the meaning of care in spatial politics via Michael Stone-Richards and how popular documentary has shaped our fears of data, we’re dropping off ballots and pushing through mid-semester zoom fatigue.
Ronald McDowell, The Foot Soldier, 1995. Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, Alabama. Photo © Kathleen Thompson
MONDAY, OCTOBER 26
GEOPOETICS IN PRACTICE — NMSU Department of Geography — 1:30 to 3:00 pm MT
Eric Magrane, assistant professor in the Department of Geography, has published an edited book, "Geopoetics in Practice," in Routledge’s Research in Culture, Space and Identity Series. Gathering 24 essays of an international cohort whose work converges at the crossroads of poetics and the material world, "Geopoetics in Practice" offers insights into poetry, place, ecology and writing the world through a critical-creative geographic lens. Magrane, his co-editors and selected contributors will discuss the book in a virtual event from 1:30 to 3 p.m. Monday, Oct. 26. This event is open to the public and also coincides with a new seminar on the geohumanities that Magrane has designed and is teaching this fall at NMSU that focuses on the growing intersections between geography and the humanities. For more information on the event, contact Magrane at magrane@nmsu.edu.
REGNER RAMOS: "QUEERLY POLITICAL ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICES" — Illinois Architecture — 5pm CT
Regner Ramos is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Puerto Rico, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on architectural design, architectural theory, architectural publishing, as well as supervises dissertations. He's got a PhD in Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL (2016), and has taught at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London College of Communication, Queer Mary University, and University of Hertfordshire. Ramos is interested in researching the relationship between queerness and space through model-making, drawing, mobile technologies, site-based events, and performative writing. He is Editor-in-Chief of informa journal since 2016, Architecture Editor at Glass magazine since 2012, and his upcoming book Queer Sites in Global Contexts: Technologies, Spaces, and Otherness (co-edited with Sharif Mowlabocus) will be published by Routledge in December this year. He is a two-time FIPI grant winner, most recently for his two-year project "Cüirtopia: Mapping an Architectural Register and Cultural Memory of Queer Spaces in Puerto Rico" which began this term.
WHAT'S TECHNOLOGY GOT TO DO WITH IT? — MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology - 6 PM EDT
Barbara London will investigate how media art is shaped by its DNA: technology, real-world politics, and art’s mutability. She will focus on how early pioneers and today’s young innovators combine forms, and along the way revise the definitions of such categories as single-channel, installation, performance, painting, photography, and interactivity. Most aspects of daily life are touched today by the Internet and social media’s broad reach. Now since COVID-19, artists are forging inventions that go beyond conventional gallery spaces. To make her points, London will discuss the work of artists Julia Scher (surveillance), Zhang Peili (installation), Teiji Furuhashi (performance and installation), Zina Saro-Wiwa (documentary and installation), Cao Fei (Second Life), and Rachel Rossin (VR).
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27
EVERETT L. FLY: “American Cultural Landscapes: Black Roots and Treasures” — HARVARD GSD — 7:30PM EST
Everett L. Fly believes that African American legacies are embedded in the physical and cultural substance of many of America’s built and vernacular places. Formal education in architecture introduced him to the positive potential of planning and design in respecting and expressing the cultures of people wherever they live, work and play. He believes that American planning and design should be more deliberate in reflecting and respecting a broader cultural diversity, including Black and Indigenous people. Fly will discuss research, discovery, interpretation and applications of his preservation and cultural landscape work, including autonomous Black settlements, urban enclaves, districts, schools, churches, cemeteries, cultural rituals and traditions.
IMAGES, MEMORY AND JUSTICE — UC Santa Cruz — 4:00 P.M. PST
Founder/executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) Bryan Stevenson is the featured speaker for the second event in Visualizing Abolition, joining Gina Dent for a conversation about art, culture, and activism. Bryan Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has, over the last two decades, tirelessly worked to challenge the racial and economic injustices of mass incarceration in the United States. Stevenson has also been at the forefront of the creation of two cultural sites, The Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. For Visualizing Abolition, Stevenson will discuss how those institutions relate to his legal social justice initiatives.
HUMAN RACE AND NON-HUMAN SPECIES: NEW AND FORTHCOMING BOOKS — American Society for Environmental History — 7:00-8:30 PM EDT
This webinar brings together three authors of recent and forthcoming books about human race and non-human species. Saheed Aderinto of Western Carolina University will speak on his forthcoming book “Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria” (Ohio University Press, 2021). Drawing on rich evidence from a critically important case, this work makes the assertion that animals, too, were colonial subjects. Next, Bénédicte Boisseron, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will present a synopsis of Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (Columbia University Press, 2018). Boisseron investigates the relationship between race and the animal in the Americas and the Black Atlantic, exposing a hegemonic system that measures the value of life. Finally, Yuka Suzuki of Bard College addresses The Nature of Whiteness: Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe (University of Washington Press 2017). Suzuki’s work on the intertwining of race and nature in post-independence Zimbabwe explores how conservation has been a political resource for white farmers, even as the killing of Cecil the Lion by an American trophy hunter exposed the tensions in their claims.
DATA AUTOGRAPHIES: Material Readings of Urban Data Infrastructures — Princeton — 11:00 am EST
Data visualization is the dominant medium for experiencing data. It also has a seemingly trivial limitation: it can only begin once data exist. Once data exist, however, the material processes and conditions of their generation tend to be forgotten. In his talk, Dietmar Offenhuber will take a close look at the relationship between environmental data and the material conditions of their generation. Based on his work on sensing at the urban scale, from waste tracking to noise and pollution, he will introduce a material (rather than symbolic) reading of environmental data and discuss the various blind spots such a perspective can address.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28
PANEL: THE ARCHITECTURE OF DEMOCRACY — HARVARD GSD — 7:30PM EST
In the week before the U.S. general election, Harvard and MIT will share a public discussion on the role of architecture in a representative democracy. Colleagues and students from across both institutions will join in dialogue on the profession’s role in supporting democratic society, now and in the future.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29
HOW TO BRING A MONUMENT TO SPEECH — Columbia GSAPP — 11:00am EST
One of the possible ways of implementing an approach both holistic and active emerges from the actual meaning of a monument, i.e. the transmission of information about the past to the present and the future. The active conception of protection means: to find this information, identify its bearers, protect it, evaluate (revive, develop, elevate) it, and find a method of how to communicate it on individual and social levels. As such, we could therefore speak of a “communicative monument”. How, though, do we “make a monument speak”? How do we interpret the intellectual contents saved within the monument? How do we make it part of a conversation with the present? The various possible forms of this approach, are display both in general and as they are applied in work of the Prague studio MCA atelier of architects Pavla Melková and Miroslav Cikán.
PATHS TO PRISON: ON THE ARCHITECTURES OF CARCERALITY — Columbia GSAPP — 6:30PM EST
Launch and discussion of the forthcoming book Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. Edited by Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt with contributions by Adrienne Brown, Stephen Dillon, Jarrett M. Drake, Sable Elyse Smith, James Graham, Leslie Lodwick, Dylan Rodríguez, Anne Spice, Brett Story, Jasmine Syedullah, Mabel O. Wilson, and Wendy L. Wright. As Angela Y. Davis has proposed, the “path to prison,” which so disproportionately affects communities of color, is most acutely guided by the conditions of daily life. Architecture, then, as fundamental to shaping these conditions of civil existence, must be interrogated for its involvement along this diffuse and mobile path. Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality aims to expand the ways the built environment’s relationship to and participation in the carceral state is understood in architecture.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30
IMAGINE THE EARTH IS YOUR LOVER — The Ecosexuals — Streaming Premiere
The One Minutes Series Imagine The Earth Is Your Lover is curated by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens and creates a document of the ecosex movement. In the series of one-minute videos, 23 artists and filmmakers visualize their mad, passionate and fierce love for the Earth. They shift the metaphor from ‘Earth as Mother’ to ‘Earth as Lover’ in order to create a more mutual and sustainable relationship with the Earth.