Creative Resistance: Architecture, Art, Writing, a Life…
Tuesday 4 July, 2-8pm
Institute of Advanced Studies
IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing, Wilkins Building
Jane Rendell and Hélène Frichot will lead a workshop for MA and PhD students and staff exploring and performing the role of critical and creative writing through their research. How can experimental approaches to writing in architecture open up spaces for resistance, dissidence, liberation?
If you would like to present and/or perform some writing for around 10-15 minutes, please send a short proposal of max 200-word abstract, including a small writing sample to j.rendell@ucl.ac.uk by 21 April 2017.
Thematics to explore might include:
productive tensions between criticality and creativity
in the mix – exploring hybrid genres
possession/liberation – finding, making, taking voice
biography and life-writing, auto- and others.
conditions for/expectations of – the academic context as a place of liberation and control
coming before v coming after – questions of citation and appropriation
writing, objects, spaces – trans-textualities
The afternoon will consist of presentations of writing and end at 6pm with a keynote presentation from Dr Helene Frichot.
Exhausting the Exhausted: Ficto-critical Approaches to Creative Resistance (It’s better to be a glaneuse than a flaneuse)
Ficto-criticism combines techniques of fiction and critical theory with the aim of challenging assumptions about our contemporary social and political milieus. Although fiction is never obliged to be faithful to reality, when combined with the emancipatory potential of criticism it holds the power to disrupt habitual ways of seeing and acting amidst our everyday lives, a large part of which are composed of the material and ecological relations of our constructed worlds, or ‘environment-worlds’. This lecture examines the background and methodology of ficto-criticism with the aim of deploying it as a concept-tool of creative resistance within architecture. As a ficto-critical speculative gesture, it further re-introduces the aesthetic figure of the glaneur/glaneuse, to counter the conceptually and materially exhausted figure of the flaneur/flaneuse.
Dr Hélène Frichot is an Associate Professor and Docent in the School of Architecture and the Built Environment, KTH, Stockholm. She is the director of the research division Critical Studies in Architecture. With her colleagues she recently convened the 13th international AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association) conference, with the title Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, see architecturefeminsims.org. During 2017 she is on a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond funded sabbatical, and is based in Nuremberg, Germany.
Judgement Calls: Ethical Dilemmas in Art and Architectural Research
A workshop for Bartlett and Slade PhD Students
10-8pm, Tue 13 June 2017
Rm 6.02, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL,
22 Gordon St,
London, WC1H 0QB
This one-day PhD workshop hosted by the Bartlett and the Slade focuses on ethical dilemmas in art and architectural research and practice.
The day will include presentations from Bartlett and Slade PhD students, as well as talks from invited respondents, Prof Barb Bolt (Victoria College of the Arts, University of Melbourne), Making it Real: iDARE (innovation. Design. Art. Research. Ethics) and Prof Estelle Barrett (Institute of Koorie Education, Deaking University), The Ethics of Intercultural Research. Among their other research activities, Barb and Estelle are the co-editors of three books on creative research practice: Material Inventions: Applying Creative Arts Research, London (I.B.Tauris, 2014); Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts, London, (I.B. Tauris, 2013); and Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, (I.B.Tauris, 2007). Dr David Roberts will also be presenting drafts of ethical practice guidance he is preparing as part of the Bartlett Ethics Commission.
Jane Rendell, SILVER (Hobart: A Published Event, 2017). 96pp., 32 illustrations.
SILVER, is a ‘fictionella’ as Justy Phillips would have it, and was commissioned by artists Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodword as part of Lost Rocks. Its narrative was drawn out of my visits to a number of sites connected to BHP Billiton, including its ‘birth place’, Broken Hill, a town in the Barrier Ranges of south Australia, where a mineral lode rich in silver was discovered in the late nineteenth century.
http://www.apublishedevent.net/projects/lost-rocks/editions/a-slow-publishing-event
In March 2017, SILVER was reconfigured, in a Courthouse, a historical building that is part of the West Coast Heritage Centre in Zeehan, west Tasmania, a mining town also founded on silver, and connected to one of the early proprietors of the Broken Hill mine. Here new voices were added to the multi-vocal narrative of the fictionella, and redistributed through the six clearly labelled positions of the Courthouse – Witness, Clerk of Court, Police Prosecutor & Lawyer, Defendant, Magistrate, and Audience. SILVER: A Courthouse Drama for Six Positions deals with issues of justice and ethics connected to mining, including reference to specific events related to BHP Billiton, for example the catastrophic tailings dam burst in Brazil in November 2015, which occurred as I was making my way to Broken Hill.
http://www.apublishedevent.net/projects/lost-rocks/editions/crocoite-crocoite-silver-silver-lead