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  • Creative Resistance 4 July 2017
    April 20th, 2017

    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.