Convenors:
Alina Apostu (SOAS University of London)
Carlo Cubero (Tallinn University)
Abstract:
This panel invites multimodal works (in progress or complete) and performative, as well as text-based, presentations that address the relationship between power, intimacy, and urban infrastructures. We wish to problematise urban experiences by examining affective and built infrastructures’ potential to transform cities into elastic spaces through everyday practices.
Mundane practices and (non)deliberate acts of subversion and imagination that emerge from sensory-affective urban patterns and movements allow us to approach the city as a field of potentialities where potentialities (incomplete, uncontained events or acts, taken-for-granted practices) afford various degrees of urban elasticity. How do these spaces of bending literal or unspoken rules without reaching the breaking point allow or restrict the multiplication of diverse possibilities of living in urban spaces?
Interventions that scrutinise notions of the city as static or rigid, power as categorical, and activism as an organised endeavour are welcome to develop together a discussion on power as a non-linear relationship, activism as mundane, and embodied practices of everyday urban living. The questions below point to some, by no means exclusive, explorations:
- How do sensory-affective configurations produce degrees of urban elasticity, social change, and power?
- How do sensory-affective urban movements and patterns connect individuals to collective urban experiences?
- How do sensoriums illuminate experiences of and potentials for urban intimacy?
We are interested in contributing to this discussion from the perspective of multimodal ethnography and we encourage non-text submissions such as video, photography, sound recordings, as well as performative presentations alongside text-based presentations.
Accepted contributions:
. “Delinking” Berlin’s Soviet Colonial Legacies using Watercolours and other Artistic Media – Gregory Gan (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)
. Walking around Bucharest’s dormitory quarters: some notes on serendipitous intimacy at the temporal outskirts of a postsocialist city – Alina Apostu (SOAS University of London)
. Bonding with non-site of memory. Multisensory endeavours of intimacy in the shadow of an emerging museum – Magdalena Banaszkiewicz (Jagiellonian University)
. Engaged residents as informal urban planners. A bottom-up re-appropriation project in the neighborhood of an Italian city – Donatella Schmidt (Università di Padova) Daphne Reguiesse (Ca’ Foscari- CSH New Delhi)
. Urban Entanglements: A multimodal navigation of migrant livelihoods through the senses and affectivity in Lisboa – Matthew Tristan da Silva (Institute of Social Sciences (ICS), University of Lisbon (UL))
. Mapping the intermittent city: Filipino domestic workers senso-spatial experiences in Hong Kong – Laura Lamas-Abraira (Spanish National Research Council (CSIC))
. Audiovisual Palimpsests – Voices and moving pictures as projected substances that insist in the choreographic movement of the urban landscape – Eduardo Gama (University of Bristol)