(BUILDING) NEW PERSPECTIVES through Practice-led Research in Art, Design and Architecture

Description

Paper Title:
Practicing Amid/Upon/With Urgency
(included under the symposium track Building on Crisis: Emerging Spatial Practices in Times of Urgency)

Abstract:
This paper attends to the notion of ‘urgency’ (more specifically ‘environmental urgency’) and examines what it means to practice amid, upon and with it. Underpinned by non-representational theoretical perspectives, the paper approaches urgency as a felt quality that operates as a collective affective atmosphere. Focusing on spatial design practices that are mobilized in response to a sense of urgency and on their urgent responses, I aim to problematize the prevailing technocratic orientations of contemporary reactions to crises which continue to be ruled by the thinking/feeling divide. Turning attention to urgency’s affective dimension and its susceptibility to modulation, the paper asks: How might spatial practices engage in purposely modulating surfaces of experience in order to encourage the move from urgency as an affectively limiting collective atmosphere to urgency as an affectively empowering and socially and politically mobilizing one? By arguing that an appeal to urgency is effective only when it is affective, my intention is to situate sensation in unfolding contemporary crises and to demonstrate that responses to times of urgency should be involved in knowledge as much as in experience, in thinking as much as in feeling. The paper, therefore, seeks to reinstate the importance of practicing aesthetics as a fundamental part of spatial design that requires situated experimentation and skill.

Period	10 Nov 2022 → 11 Nov 2022
Event type	Symposium
Location	Riga, LatviaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International