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The imaging of the city: The production of subjectivity within the dazzlement of the affective networked city
Get PDFThis research conceptualises the networked city as a machinic screen. The affective forces of technology upon the city-as-screen is framed by a Deleuzian methodology, where affect theory is central. Research focuses on the Thatcherite imaginary connected to East London and then to discussion of other contemporary cities. This research claims that the increased technological networking of the ‘smart’ city to light-emitting diodes (L.E.D.s) creates increased screen-like luminescence that plays a key role in sense-making experience, but importantly, also in the imaging of the city within a neo-liberal imaginary. Steven Shaviro’s concept of ‘post-cinematic affect’ is applied to the reading of the city as an affect-laden spectacle. Research is conducted into the visuality of the city within modernity, using the symbol of the skyscraper as a thread to connect the Empire State Building, One Canada Square, and the Burj Khalifa. There is an exploration of the relationship between the imaginaries of the city and the modulation of the subject within it. Hocquenghem’s queer affect theory is used to examine queer representations of the city and as a method for remediating the spectacle of the city. This process involves mapping the affects encountered in East London to examine the dazzlement of the networked city. This affective mapping is used to develop a creative practice that aims to resignify the neo-liberal spectacle through a queer narrative. This form of ‘détournement’ of the city is also explored in examples of cinema and art where it operates as a form of resistant agency
The reparative turn in painting: Monstrous interventions in art and identity studies
Get PDF‘Wicked problems’ in socio-political, climate, and economic spheres are on the rise, creating complex threats to survival. Additionally, despite the many human rights gains achieved during recent decades, identity-based inequality and injustice persists disenfranchising some, while granting benefits to others, thus generating an escalating need for repair. This practice-led thesis researches through painting, discourse between painters, and study of painting to discover how narrative, visual, affective, empowering, and transmutative approaches in these practices become reparative by subverting or redressing damage caused by identity-based bias as well as engaging in worldbuilding imbued with hopeful futurities. In personal practice and through participatory action research (PAR), this project explores a multitude of reparative painting methods including production of uplift, speculative work exploring imaginative optimistic futures, expression of wounded narratives, transfer of and/or realization of power, monstrous reclamations, beauty or rage, as well as working towards recovery from trauma. It researches how a reparative turn in painting can generate agency through a psychic/visceral reaching towards an exit from dynamics of identity-based exclusions. Painting provides an article as well as an action through which monsterizing processes of cultural production tied to identity are troubled as well as analysed materially, visually, and in encounter. This thesis takes up Sedgwick’s call to further reparative reading approaches in research, then moves it further along by positioning painting and embodied practices, instead of reading, as the focus of inquiry hereby moving research beyond language, into material, performative, and encounter generated realms. The research offers findings discovered in studio interview fieldwork, personal studio practice, content transmutation, material aliveness, and conceptions of monstrous repair, then ties them together to demonstrate the multitude of ways these diverse modes work as reparative practices. The “Repair” chapter presents a kind of genealogy of reparative theories from psychoanalysis to queer theory. The “Painting from the Other Side” curatorial PAR chapter uses fieldwork-based studio visit interviews to develop case studies of reparative painting in the practices of eight contemporary painters. These examples illuminate how contemporary painting practices move ambitions for repair from hope to theory, into paint, and later the public realm. The “Painting-Colour chapter offers further analysis of repair in contextual production diffractively considering the dynamics of colour and culture through each other as well as how perception emerges in ever becoming encounters. Showing that just as deep blue can turn what appeared to be lavender, pink, cultural productions that monsterize some are just as malleable. The knowledge created here offers a new framework detailing how an embodied and diffractive methodological process can be used to create constructive and productive exits as well as generate agency formation with the capacity to provide release from and repair of the damage resulting from dynamics of othering or monsterizing
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, …”: Josephine Baker and modern architecture across the colonised Arab world
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Spectral transmissions: Midnight in the haunted karaoke
No full textIt is nighttime in the city. Tatty terraces and scattered concrete tower blocks, the detritus of a vast up-turned wheelie bin bathed in orange twilight. Around this time of year strange things happen. The ether is populated with unruly beasts. Pipes can be heard tapping in the darkness, lightbulbs flicker, music plays on an unplugged jukebox and faint calls of distant laughter can be heard echoing in the subway. An empty karaoke booth crackles into life and the soft crooning lament drifts through the still corridors, someone has entered the building. Contains fragments of: Stomu Yamash'ta's Red Buddha Theatre; What a way to live in modern times With thanks to: Stephen Mallinder and antivoid alliance
CHEAD Leadership Programme Seminar: Developing Creative Pedagogic Practice
No full textThis talk explores how art and design pedagogy—particularly experimental, interdisciplinary design practices—can contribute to education beyond the art school, equipping learners across disciplines to engage with complexity, uncertainty, and rapid change. Drawing on teaching and research at the Royal College of Art, the presentation argues that art school methods are not valuable only for producing designers, but for cultivating capacities that are urgently needed in relation to global challenges such as climate change, artificial intelligence, mental health, and the future of work. The talk outlines a transferable pedagogical framework grounded in core practices of art and design education: interpreting complex situations, envisioning alternative futures, engaging in material and experiential praxis, and translating insight into intervention. These approaches foster comfort with uncertainty, systems thinking, ethical reflection, and learner agency, enabling participants to act boldly at local scales while understanding their actions within broader systemic contexts. A central case study is POD, an immersive, game-based project in which students engage with climate futures by responding to adaptation challenges from nonhuman perspectives within a simulated future Thames River ecosystem. The project demonstrates how play, speculative world-building, and decentring the human viewpoint can support deeper engagement with ecological systems, ethics, and decision-making. The talk also reflects on subsequent iterations of this work, including experiments focused on ethical collaboration with nonhuman actors, as well as adaptations of these methods for educators, policymakers, and professional audiences beyond formal education. Rather than proposing a single model to be replicated wholesale, the presentation argues for the selective translation and amplification of art school strategies—such as playfulness, experimentation, and alternative ways of seeing—as vital components of future-facing interdisciplinary education and public practice
The coloniality of Italian fascist architecture
Get PDFThis article traces the modern history of the Piazza di Porta Capena in Rome. It begins with the design of a modernist building for the square by the architects Ridolfi and Cafiero in 1938 created to celebrate the empire of fascist Italy. The building was intended to host the Ministry of the Colonies and to be flanked by an ancient stele looted from Aksum in Ethiopia. With the shift to a new world order after 1945, the building was completed to serve as the headquarters of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. As part of Italy's belated commitment to reparations for colonial crimes, the stele was dismantled and reinstalled in Aksum in 2008. The void thus created in the piazza was filled by a new monument, this time a memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attack in New York in 2001. Through the lens of the ‘coloniality of architecture', this article explores the changing aesthetics of the square, uncovering a history of shared rationalities between Italian fascist colonialism and its afterlife, as forms of government of ‘others'. By investigating the pìazza’s architectural configurations, it assists the re-orientation of narratives around the history of Italian fascist architecture
Montanha invertida / inverted mountain: Green extractivism in Barroso
No full textFilm / animation produced for the Compulsive Desires exhibition in Porto, 2022, analysing the potential impacts of lithium mining to the landscapes, ecosystems and villages of Covas do Barroso and Romainho, and at large to the enviornments on Barroso, in the north of Portugal
Green spaces: New paintings by Catherine Ferguson
No full textThe paintings showing in Green Spaces were completed in the summer of 2023, when the highest ever global temperatures were recorded, and wildfires burned across Europe. Gaia is becoming overwhelmed . These pictures struggle with the question, what is art’s role in this? If painting creates models for seeing more clearly into the problems that concern us, then its lessons for the planet involve acknowledging material limits and limitations. Like the biophysical and metabolic limits of the Earth which induce invention out of constraints, the limit of paintings’ flat and bounded surface is also generative. Just as Gaia invites us to evolve through a closer involvement with her (as an alternative to continuing to project our interests and desires onto her surface) so painting invites us to evolve as we encounter sensations generated by her surface, beyond the projection of a painted image
The post-political curator: Critical curatorial practice in de-politicised enclosures
Get PDFThe Post-political Curator: Critical Curatorial Practice in De-Politicised Enclosures is a practice-led investigation into the problems and possibilities for critical curating in twenty-first century new towns. I propose that the newest settlements are apparatuses through which a post-political consensus is constructed and reproduced. I question whether the construction of an agonistic public sphere is possible through curating and consider whether the public sphere is foreclosed by the socio-political arrangements of a de-politicised enclosure. This project sets up an enquiry using the post-political as a critical framework to reconceive the relation between the politics of new housing developments and curating. A form of critical curating which presumes that criticality is a transformative mode of practice with the capacity to intervene effectively in hegemonic regimes is problematic. What if we curators can no longer practise with these assumptions? This thesis analyses the claims made for critical and socially engaged curatorial practices and asks, what is at stake when we practise ‘politically’ in a context that has been de-politicised, like the twenty-first-century new town? This investigation is led by my practice in the newest new towns of Cranbrook, Devon and Ebbsfleet, Kent and in my role as Research Curator at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. With an orientation towards the horizon of the political, this project re-examines the very function of curating and art in the context of a new town and proposes the figure of a ‘post-political curator’. The research invokes the methods of a community organiser and the activist's instruction manual as a genre of writing; the final practical project which has resulted from this is a Handbook for the Post-Political Curator. I claim that producing the handbook, and the intention for it to be collectively edited, constitutes a post-political curatorial practice. The handbook is designed to function independently as a resource for curators who want to push back against the foreclosure of political agency. Alongside the thesis, the handbook also serves as documentation for my discursive and administrative curatorial practice undertaken as part of the PhD research. The handbook and the notion of the Post-Political Curator do not seek to re-politicise the new town or solve the disenfranchisement that such conditions produce but rather to propose a new conception of curating’s relation to politics and the means to realise an alternative function for critical curatorial practices