How can we share knowledge and thoughts to create a positive vision of sustainable action and alternative ways of living?
How do we understand the increasing privatization of public space?
What is the public’s responsibility to address economic and social concerns within the city?
In response to the UK housing crisis, guest speakers Alberto Duman, Jane Rendell and Torange Khonsari each bring their own physical fragment of ‘evidence’ as a prompt to discuss the role of art, activism and architecture in politicizing, questioning and creating movements of resistance to this challenging urban context.
In this event Duman explores the increasingly important activity of redaction against the backdrop of regeneration developments.
Khonsari presents housing as an agent to public service, stimulating discussion of current planning laws and alternative housing models that negotiate between the private and the public.
Rendell examines the spaces and voices of the Public Inquiry as a site of state bureaucracy, one which operates as a key part of the decision-making process concerning whether to demolish social housing estates.
The speakers’ presentations are followed by a breakout session where you, the participant, are invited to bring and share your own forms of evidence. These forms of evidence could be photographs, objects, documents, anecdotes or memories that represent or relate to your experience of the housing crisis.
This event is part of the London Festival of Architecture 2015.
Biographies
Alberto Duman
Alberto Duman is an artist, lecturer and independent researcher whose core interests are located in the cultural production of urban space and the agency of art within the immaterial economy of this production. He works with the DIG Collective, who took part in REAL ESTATES at PEER gallery and most recently Duman runs the BA Level 3 Fine Art module Art Practice: Collaboration, Exhibition, Community at Middlesex University.
Torange Khonsari
Torange Khonsari is currently a director of the art and architecture practice public works, an interdisciplinary practice working in the threshold of participatory and performative art, architecture and related fields of anthropology always within the public realm of the city. Khonsari teaches art/architecture crossover at London Metropolitan University (The Cass) and the studio ‘Architecture and Activism’ at Royal College of Art in London. Torange is also the chair of the self-organised community garden (abbey Gardens) she helped set up seven years ago
Jane Rendell
Jane Rendell is an academic and writer whose work crosses architecture, art, feminism, history and psychoanalysis. She has developed concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ (2002/6) and ‘site-writing’ (2007/10).