Lecture series: ‘Civil imagination as staging ground for action Towards an architecture of the And’
A series of public lectures and conversation
curated by Roemer van Toorn (UMA School of Architecture, Sweden)
KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas
February, March, April 2017
1st Public lecture and roundtable conversation
Thursday, 9 February 2017, 4 PM, Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels
Launch Flat Out, Penelope Dean (School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago)
Easier Done Than Said, Robert E. Somol (School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago)
Everyone is welcome! We ask for everyone (visitors AND participating students/lecturers of the Faculty of Architecture) to register here.
16.00 – 16.30
– Welcome audience and guests, why lecture series, flat -out launch, Martine de Maeseneer (15 min)
– Introduction Civil Imagination series, Penelope Dean and Robert E. Somol, Roemer van Toorn (15 min)
16.30 – 17.40
– Launch flat out Magazine, Penelope Dean, 20 minutes
– Reception
17.40 – 18.30
– Lecture Easier Done Than Said, Robert E. Somol
18.30 – 19.30
– Roundtable conversation moderated by Roemer van Toorn, with Robert E. Somol, Penelope Dean, Martine de Maeseneer, about new imaginations including role magazine).
https://www.facebook.com/events/1642854739343637/
Read more below.
Civil Imagination as Staging Ground for Action
Towards an Architecture of the And
A series of public lectures and conversation curated by Roemer van Toorn
KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas
February, March, April 2017 (Part 1)
“The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape.”
Arjun Appadurai[i]
“Spectacular culture is most often designed to manipulate people and take their money, not set the stage for liberty, equality, and fraternity. (…) The challenge for the progressives is to create ethical spectacles. (…) They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams [imaginations] that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.”
Stephen Duncombe[ii]
“In order to make room for the return of the category of the civil, and for a place of the civil imagination within it, it is necessary to redefine the political imagination. I propose we term “political imagination” that form of imagination that exceeds the grasp of the individual mind – it is a form of imagination that transcends the single individual alone and exists between individuals and is shared by them.”
Ariella Azoulay[iii]
It is not hard to imagine affluent communities protected by walls, watchtowers, searchlights and machine guns – as president elect Donald Trump, and the European Community have advocated recently – while the poor scavenge for food in the wastelands beyond, or drown in the Mediterranean Sea escaping war. With a grim political enemy, populist and a fundamentalist one at that, the world will no doubt be forced more and more to reflect on the foundations of its own civilisation; what other civil imagination could be enacted? More encouragingly are the social movements[iv] seeking to sketch out new relations between globality and locality, diversity and solidarity. If one thing is crystal clear, it is that the current political map has to be redrawn, including the creating of a new aesthetics and spatial distribution. At its heart must be the belief that citizenry is a better way to organize society than markets – that some things are not for sale. As society – and architects within it – we must imagine the possibility of something else based on a new idea of the collective and the individual within the hybrid formations and interdependence of our times, confronting the many mutations, and unequal struggle in concrete situations today and what happiness could entail. It is of transformative importance the way contemporary society can be imagined from a renewed civil perspective.
The idea of the city, the countryside, the natural and the artificial, work and automation, the real and the virtual, the common and the private, leisure and labor, the local and the global, the cliché and the foreign, the objective and subjective action, and many other co-existences are at stake. The old maps, which helped and taught us how to navigate in the past, no longer work. New forms of civil belonging, which in our contemporary world are bound to be multiple rather than monolithic, need to be developed. Some of those forms will likely have something of the intimacy of tribal or community relations, while others will be highly abstract, virtual, mediated and indirect.
As the philosopher Alain Badiou remarked we cannot continue the experiences of the last century. Important to understand is that our global condition (of the Anthropocene or Chthulucene[v] according to Donna Harraway) is in need of a new conceptual framework after the failure of late-capitalism. “The new normal” arising within the functional stratum of layers that specifies and links heterogeneous technologies together (what Benjamin Bratton recently called “The Stack”[vi], with its “Vertical” dimensions as described by Stephen Graham[vii] and Peter Sloterdijk’s[viii] Foam qualities, or what I have called “The Society of the And”[ix]) does not only questions our sovereignty, but challenges and can inspire us what possible futures of civil imagination can be conceived within the now. Not only the new, and it’s possible beautiful accidents, but the devastating inequality, the destruction of nature, its populist fundamentalism, and the opportunities of the digital need to be addressed.
This public lecture and conversation series steps in the footsteps of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai who stated “The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape.” It intends to offer a reorientation for critical readers to question reality from a fresh perspective and inspire imaginative actions to hypothesize and conjecture alternatives to the status quo, developing and opening avenues of real instrumental collaborations. The idea is to discover, question and elaborate unconventional efforts that experiment with a new urban citizenry and thereby renew civil imagination.
Roemer van Toorn
lecture list and dates:
FEBRUARY
Public lecture and roundtable conversation
Thursday, 9 February 2017
Launch Magazine Flat Out, Penelope Dean
Easier Done Than Said, Robert E. Somol
MARCH
Public lecture and roundtable conversation
March 2017
Topologies of Civil Imagination, Scott Lash*
APRIL
Public lecture and roundtable conversation
April 2017
Rewilding the City, Stefano Boeri*
*Lecturers to be confirmed.
[i] Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
[ii] Stephen Duncombe, in Dream. Re-imagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy, 2007.
[iii] Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination. A political Ontology of Photography, Verso, 2012.
[iv] See also for instance the political movements in Spain (Podemos), America (Bernie Sanders’ Political Revolution), United Kingdom (Jeremy Corbyn of the labour party) and in Greece (Yanis Varoufakis of the Syriza party).
[v] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Verso, 2016. “Chthlucene is a simple word. It is a compound of two Greek roots (Khthon and Kainos) that together name a kind of time place for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth.
[vi] The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty”, Benjamin H. Bratton, 2016. See also Bratton’s Strelka studio in Moscow, entitled “The New normal” (http://www.strelka.com/en/magazine/2016/08/30/-what-is-the-new-normal-and-how-to-untangle-it), 2016.
[vii] Stephen Graham, Vertical. The City from Satellites to Bunkers, Verso 2016.
[viii] Peter Sloterdijk, Volume 3: Foams, Macrosperology, MIT press, 2016.
[ix] The Society of the And. The bewildering interdependence of our times, text-image book Roemer van Toorn, forthcoming. See also article in “Society of the And”, Archilab The Naked City, editor Bart Lootsma, 2004.