Ex-Situ Workshop in UK

structures3bEx-Situ co-organizer and Dept. of Anthropology affiliate, Yoke Sum Wong (Lancaster University) has organized a symposium and writing salon for this May.

Download programme.pdf

STRUCTURES OF FEELINGS A SYMPOSIUM AND WRITING SALON

15 MAY 2015

The title of this meeting is inspired by Raymond Williams’ Structures of Feeling essay (1977) in which we explore “a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange.”

It is this embryonic phase that we give attention to in the experiencing of architecture as immaterial and material and as we navigate its configurations – negotiating towards the affective consciousness of spatial form/s that is at once social and personal – emergent and emerging – in an ‘interrelating continuity’. How do spatial forms contribute to, as Susan Lepselter writes, an ethnography of emergent feeling? How do we feel architecture and world it – taking worlding as a way of apprehension and comprehension – giving it a structure that we make (non)sense of.

The bridging of thought and feeling, the sensations that we encounter in built environments – despair, happiness, joy, fear, dread, hope, disgust nostalgic, warmth and so on – are often evoked instantaneously before we begin to stitch the narratives together or to grasp why we are attuned to the spaces the way we do. Another way of framing it is through Kathleen Stewart’s ‘atmospheric attunements’ which “attend to the quickening of nascent forms, marking their significance in sounds and sights and the feel of something’s touch or something penetrating…[turning] a potentiality into a threshold to the real.”

The structure of this gathering is based on the writing workshops held at The University of Texas, Austin, and the Ex-Situ Workshop in Marfa, Texas. As opposed to the conventional academic paper, we seek the “embryonic” eg. creative short pieces that reflect the theme (broadly) and are no more than 750 words or a presentation piece of no more than 15 images or 10 minutes of video/audio productions. We also welcome all forms of experimental work.

At present, the call for participation is internal and we hope to hear an expression of interest by 31 March. Instead of an abstract, we seek an idea, a theme, an image.Our aim is to have three presentations per hour to provide time for discussion.

Please respond to y.wong@lancaster.ac.uk or adam.kaasa@rca.ac.uk

download the poster: structures3

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