Spatial/Diffractive Bodies Situated in Place : Matters of Fidelity and Precariousness.

 

Bringing Things To Life.

Creative entanglements in a world of materials. 

The Environment Without Objects.

Tim Ingold. 2008

Intermediaries within the cyanotype process.

Trace drawings on paper with organic and material from the built environment.

Drawing/Making Processes.

Architectural Body : Organism, Person, Environment. Arakawa and Gins. 

 "[...] the body [...] continually transforms itself and is already not, at the moment when I speak of it, what it was a few seconds ago." (Laplantine, 2015:13)

Laplantine, F. 2015 [2005]. The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic.

Through the choreographing of our learning processes we create the conditions for engagement/entanglement and production/transformation, which are all modalities of movement and action. So we see pedagogical, architectural and professional practices as potential practices of transformation and co-learning. Dance – somehow both connected to and different than choreography – brings with it a whole set of values which we consider significant for the architectural pedagogy we enact. 

Lepeki lists the 'constitutive qualities' of dance as 

"ephemerality, corporeality, precariousness, scoring and performativity" (Lepecki 2012:15) 

He goes on to say that "[t]hese qualities are responsible for dance's capacity to harness and activate critical and compositional elements crucial to the fusion of politics and aesthetics …"(Lepecki 2012:16)

His 'compositional' and 'critical' elements echo the event/discourse relationships within our pedagogy and in our use of choreography as dance/writing. These qualities allude to specific modes of engagement and making, and state particular values. We will use them to underscore our pedagogical modes, and develop them as necessary in a teaching practice which desires students' engagement, empowerment, and caring.

In that sense, ephemerality can be related to immediacy and an engagement with the here- and-now which cares about effects and duration. Corporeality speaks of a body, but if we ask whose body or what body, then we can expand it to be any-body, in order to speak of matter or, more precisely, of mattering and bodying. Other names for precariousness can be fragility or vulnerability, somehow always already a condition of our impossibly immediate interventions. Scoring, which can be both a ‘writing’ and an unfolding, creates spaces and times and modes for and of improvisation. And performativity always returns us anew to movement, multiplicity, effects and life.

Performative Intraventions and Matters of Care: Choreographing Values

OREN LIEBERMAN

ALBERTO ALTÉS

Abstract

Thinking through choreography as dance/writing – both the doing and the score for that doing, the event and the discourse - we propose to shift the focus of architectural practices and pedagogies from an emphasis in the attainment of competencies and  static  knowledge,  to  a  privileging  of  processes  and modalities of learning that nurture the values of engagement, empowerment and  caring  responsibility.  Choreography  situates  our  work  in  the  realm  of performative action and transformation, and it does so with and through our bodies; also, it helps us frame the power of our intraventions, which aim at transforming the world through immediate, responsible and often fragile acts of engagement with matter, movement and life.

Keywords: 

Intravention, matters of care, choreography, architectural pedagogies, modalities of learning.

More on ’intraventions’ can be found in:

Altés, A. and Lieberman, O. 2013. Intravention, Durations, Effects: Notes 

of Expansive Sites and Relational Architectures. Baunach: Spurbuch Verlag.