08/07/2021 | 19:30 - 21:00 | Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam | more info
Upon invitation of the curatorial platform Slow Research Lab, I wrote the essay 'Time by Windows is Time Well Spent: Practicing Full Emptiness in Architecture' as contribution to the new Slow Spatial Reader. Thursday night, we offically launch this new Valiz publication at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.
Thursday Night Live!
During this hybrid event the book's editor Carolyn F. Strauss will give a short introduction, followed by a talk by contributor to the book Ligia Nobre, architect, curator and current Het Nieuwe Instituut fellow (as a member of the collectiveO grupo inteiro). Ligia will talk about artist Camila Sposati's Earth Anatomical Theatre (2014), and how this one-year art piece functioned as an ‘amplifier of knowledge’ and a portal to the unknown. After, Ligia and Carolyn will engage in a dialogue with researcher and landscape architect Daphne Bakker. The programme also includes a short film curated by Bronwyn Lace of The Centre for the Less Good Idea. The evening is moderated by Sarah van Binsbergen
Slow Spatial Reader
Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection offers a collection of essays about ‘Slow’ approaches to spatial practice and pedagogy from around the world. The book’s contributors are from twenty-four countries on five continents. Each one brings distinct philosophical and disciplinary approaches—from ‘spatial’ fields like architecture, sculpture, and installation, but also performative, somatic and/or dramaturgical practices—, exploring how we think about and engage with space at a range of scales, tempos, and durations.The essays chronicle projects and processes that amplify tangible and intangible qualities of spatial experience: reaching into the cracks of the body, probing the fuzzy borders of atmospheres, and extending out across both geographical and epistemological coordinates. The term ‘radical affection’ in the book’s title was coined to unite those diverse approaches in a call for tender acts of individual and collective imagination through which new forms of caring, connection, and resilience might emerge. Like its predecessor, Slow Reader (Valiz, 2016), this new publication is intended to spur meaningful dialogue between disciplines and cultures, inspiring not only a different velocity of engaging the world but also critical shifts in consciousness.
Time by Windows is Time well Spent
Time by Windows is Time Well Spent: Practicing Full Emptiness in Architecture is a re-gnosis on the potentials of biotopological craftsmanship. Based on a study to the Japanese architectural practice of ma, practicing ‘full emptiness’ in architecture is introduced as a direct engagement with the sensorial charged field that emerges by virtue of bodies movement. In this context, architecture can be reinterpreted as a biotopological craftsmanship, a craftsmanship not of wood but of bio-topo-logical entrainment. Through a re-gnosis in which we look from the future back to today, the potentials of biotopological craftsmanship are explored. In conclusion, biotopological craftsmanship is presented as a way to overcome cultural and transcendental otherness.