Invisible Maps The Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies

An Art, Architecture and Design (AAD) Session hosted by CUBE

About this event

We cannot avoid the touch of the world. Presence emerges out of an ecology of signs; traces with different textures and surfaces that index any given encounter. That's why we can think of embodied or invisible maps which are not drawn (inscribed) on paper, but on our bodies. They are affective images as Spinoza defined them, compasses orienting our worldliness.

The session will focus on maps perceived, but not drawn. With guest speakers Lucía Jalón Oyarzun and Kristanti Paramita, we will explore ideas of embodiment, inscription, and performance, and their relations to the visual and spatial act of mapping, to cartography, and to spatial representation.

Speakers

Lucía Jalón Oyarzun is an architect and researcher. She graduated from the ETSAM School of Architecture of Madrid where she also defended her PhD, 'Exception and the rebel body: the political as generator of a minor architecture’ in 2017. She is currently Head of Research at ALICE (Atelier de la Conception de l'Espace) at EPFL and Research Fellow at the center of Digital Visual Studies (UZH), while she continues her interdisciplinary research on secrecy and clandestinity as spatial compositions under capitalism, the effects of coded environments on the body’s spatial capabilities, and maps as instruments of (dis)orientation.

Kristanti Dewi Paramita has taught architecture at Universitas Indonesia since 2010, where she was appointed as a full-time lecturer in 2012. She completed her MA and PhD by Design at the University of Sheffield's School of Architecture. Her current research takes particular interest in design activism and spatial practices, understanding how such knowledge shapes architectural design methods. She has worked extensively in action research projects and educational environment design, engaging with a variety of stakeholders in the community. She is the chief editor of ARSNET, a newly emerging architectural journal focusing on exploration of architectural design methods.

Discussant: Ektoras Arkomanis is a filmmaker, writer and a senior lecturer in architectural history and theory at London Metropolitan University. His films and research examine urban areas that remain on the margins of history, planning and the city’s conscience. He is especially interested in film's inadequacy in describing things that are no longer there, and in the narratives that are invented to fill these gaps. He is currently working on A Season in the Olive Grove, a long-term film/research project about the area of Eleonas in Athens. He recently edited a volume called Migrations in New Cinema, published by Cours de Poétique.

Chair: Dr Beatrice De Carli is a Reader in Urbanism at the School of Art, Architecture and Design and Deputy Director of the Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies (CUBE).

Image credit: Blind Man's Bluff, David Wilkie