ETHICS
– Home-Work Displacements
Early this year, around the time of the UCU pensions strike, I gave two keynotes, one at Rebuilding Architecture, the University of Yale in January 2018 and the other via skype, as I had to be on the picket line, at Critical Practice, University of Arizona, in February 2018. Both these talks engaged with my work on ethics, in connection to the London housing crisis, on the one hand, and fossil fuel divestment, on the other. The strike brought to my attention a new discipline ‘critical university studies’ which feels like a perfect home for this research, which is a form of constructive institutional critique, where speech acts perform as modes of critical spatial practice, documented in the form of site-writings.
https://www.architecture.yale.edu/calendar/73-rebuilding-architecture
– Ethics as Critical Spatial Practice
This week I am delighted to report that my work on ethics, along with colleagues at the Bartlett, such as Professor Mike Raco, Dr Claire Colomb, Michelle Shipworth, Dr Michael Walls, Dr Kerstin Sailer, Dr Martin Austwick, and Dr Efrosyni Konstantinou and others, has been recognised with a UCL Education Award. That our work has received this honour is in no small part due to the support of Bartlett Dean, Professor Alan Penn, and extraordinary labours of Dr David Roberts, the Bartlett’s Ethics Fellow, who had submitted this nomination (without my knowledge!).
‘Jane has been awarded for her long-term work on ethics in built environment teaching, research and professional practice and her department believes she is a real star! Jane’s pioneering ethical inquiry inspires reflexive, supportive, creative education of the future built environment practitioners and it is precisely this sort of unsung, but vital work that merits recognition with a UCL Education Award.’
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/news/2018/jun/achievements-ucl-teaching-and-learning-recognised-education-awards
– Redefining the Social in Architecture
I will be giving a condensed version of my work on ethics, as Home-Work Displacements, as an invited speaker at Redefining the Social In Architecture, CHASE PHD Programme, ICA London, (June 2018).
https://www.ica.art/on/learning/symposium-redefining-social-architecture
SITE–WRITING
– Coming to Terms
On a recent fieldtrip to Berlin, with MA Situated Practices students, and course director, artist-architect James O’Leary, I gave a short talk called Coming to Terms, at the amazing installation Floating University, Berlin, for a series of discussions on hot-terms, connected to site-specificity, and to lexicons, hosted by Gilly Karjefsky.
https://www.facebook.com/events/358254964685176/
– L’avant coup and l’apres coup
Performance practitioners, Emily Orley and Katja Hilavaara, generously asked me to write an opening and closing to their brilliant new collection of creative critical and critical creative writings; Emily Orley and Katja Hilavaara (eds) The Creative Critic (Routledge, 2018).
In ‘Foreword: L’avant coup’ and ‘Afterword: l’apres coup’, I look back to an event I curated -writing, which brought together geographers, architects, artists, critics and writers to consider the implications of hyphenating their writing practice. This was the final event in the Architecture & series I had convened as Director of Architecture Research at the Bartlett School of Architecture from 2004-2011. I looked back on this event through the psychic lens offered by ‘l’apres coup’, and the complementary experience that André Green has named ‘l’avant coup’.
This book will launch at Critical Creative Writing, University of Newcastle, at 6pm on Wed 27 June 2018.
https://creativecriticalwriting.wordpress.com
– Practices of Care: ‘site-writing’ and its curation.
My colleague artist Dr Polly Gould, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Newcastle Architecture School, and alumni of my site-writing module at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL – Joe Crowdy, Joanne Preston, Rachel Siobhan Tyler and Lili Zarzycki, and I will present Practices of Care: ‘site-writing’ and its curation.
This workshop will focus on methods of ‘site-writing’ and practices of care, and, more specifically, curation. During this workshop I will introduce concepts and methods developed out of my site-writing practice, and published in Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism. Polly Gould will present ideas around curation as a practice of care, and curation of writing. Joe Crowdy, Joanne Preston, Rachel Siobhan Tyler, and Lili Zarzycki will perform, from a considered curation, their ‘site-writing’ projects, developed as part of Critical Spatial Practices: Site-Writing module, part of the MA Architectural History, and MA Situated Practice, at The Bartlett, UCL.
Whether interdisciplinary, creative-critical, autobiographical, or otherwise eccentric to the academy, these works were developed in the relational space of the site-writing seminar/workshop. Despite the dynamics of care shared in such a space, the writing nevertheless constitutes a vulnerability, or fragility.
This will provide a foundation for the second part of the workshop, which is devoted to a shared discussion of work-in-progress by its participants. Participants will also have the option of presenting their work to the group.
https://creativecriticalwriting.wordpress.com/creative-critical-writing-workshop-2018/
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/programmes/postgraduate/ma-situated-practice
HOUSING
– To unsettle: art as a reflexive verb?
Curators, Charlotte Day, Shelley McSpedden & Elise Routledge, invited me to contribute an essay for a fantastic exhibition of artworks by artists such as Jasmina Cibic, Forensic Architecture, Jill Magid and others at the Monash Art Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, 2018. I wrote the essay for Unsettlement at a time when the Windrush scandal was unfolding in the press in the contest of the UK’s ‘hostile environment’. The essay reflects on the ethics and aesthetics of acts of settlement and unsettlement: ‘To unsettle: art as a reflexive verb?’
https://www.monash.edu/muma/exhibitions/exhibition-archive/2018/Unsettlement
– May Mo(u)rn
May Mo(u)rn has been published in Chinese in a wonderful of writing and photographic works, Art and Waste, edited by Rupert Griffiths and Xinwei Zhu
http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/0tGsUECybxqe9R4AsKovTw
– review of Anna Minton’s Big Capital.
I’ve recently written a review of Anna Minton’s Big Capital (Penguin, 2017), a book I feel tells the story of London’s Housing crisis in the most visceral way possible, Anna’s mixes empirical research with encounters with people involved in the crisis from property speculators to displaced residents. See the April 2018 edition of Architecture Research Quarterly.
https://www.annaminton.com
FEMINISM
– A Feminist Approach to Critical Spatial Practice
With Despina Stratigakos, I was invited to contribute to a fascinating debate on Architecture and Feminism, curated by Chloe Loh, at University College Dublin, where led by Chloe students from across the Architecture programme have been responding to feminist texts by artworks of their own.
One of the texts they were asked to respond to was my own, ‘Only Resist: A Feminist Approach to Critical Spatial Practice’, recently published in The Architects Journal, and a reworking of earlier ideas in an essay I contributed to Lori Brown’s Feminist Practices (London: Ashgate, 2012)
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/only-resist-a-feminist-approach-to-critical-spatial-practice/10028246.article
– Feminist Architecture: From A to Z
And a new short piece Feminist Architecture: From A to Z is on line at Edwin Heathcote’s collection of writings in and around design here
https://www.readingdesign.org/feminist-architecture-a-z
PSYCHOANALYSIS
– The Transitional Space of the Setting
One of the first places I started thinking about the relation of architecture and psychoanalysis through the transitional space of the setting, and as such a precursor to my new book, The Architecture of Pychoanalysis, is ‘Art’s Use of Architecture: Place, Site, and Setting’. This was originally written for Psycho Buildings, curated by Ralph Rugoff in 2008, and has just been republished in a beautiful collection of essays, Fifty Years of Great Art Writing, marking the 50th anniversary of the Hayward Gallery.
https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/blog/fifty-years-great-art-writing-hayward-gallery
https://www.ibtauris.com/books/the%20arts/architecture/the%20architecture%20of%20psychoanalysis%20spaces%20of%20transition
And I am also excited to be responding to an exquisite new publication by esteemed psychoanalyst Nathan Kravis. His new book, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud, just published by MIT Press, will launch at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies at 6pm on 22 June.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/ias-events/ias-book-launch-on-the-couch
– L’avant coup’ and l’apres coup
Performance practitioners, Emily Orley and Katja Hilavaara, generously asked me to write an opening and closing to their brilliant new collection of creative critical and critical creative writings; Emily Orley and Katja Hilavaara (eds) The Creative Critic (Routledge, 2018).
In ‘Foreword: L’avant coup’ and ‘Afterword: l’apres coup’, I look back to an event I curated -writing, which brought together geographers, architects, artists, critics and writers to consider the implications of hyphenating their writing practice. This was the final event in the Architecture & series I had convened as Director of Architecture Research at the Bartlett School of Architecture from 2004-2011. I looked back on this event through the psychic lens offered by ‘l’apres coup’, and the complementary experience that André Green has named ‘l’avant coup’.
This book will launch at Critical Creative Writing, University of Newcastle, at 6pm on Wed 27 June 2018.
https://creativecriticalwriting.wordpress.com
Forthcoming Publications
‘Condensing and Displacing: A Stratford Dream-Work’, Alberto Dumas and Anna Minton (eds) Regeneration Songs, (London: Revolver Press, forthcoming 2018).
‘Figures of Speech: before and after Writing’, Jonathan Charley (ed) Writing and Architecture (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2018).
‘Configuring Critique’, Chris Brisbin and Myra Thiessen (eds), The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2018).
‘Activating Home and Work’, Sandra Loschke (ed.), Rethinking Architectural Production: Between Experience, Action and Critique, (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2018).