Jane Rendell: Transitional Spaces: From Critical Spatial Practice to Site-Writing

Lecture (in English), Tuesday, 9 May 2017, 7 pm, Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), Grad Fužine, Pot na Fužine 2, Ljubljana

This lecture is also an announcement for the soon to be published Architecture ≠ Art book, a Slovene edition that examines the relation between art and architecture and finishes our programme Architecture ≠ Art

This talk explores “critical spatial practice”, a term I introduced in 2002 to refer to urban interventions that transgress the limits of art and architecture to engage with the social and the aesthetic, as well as the interstitial spaces between public and private. Critical spatial practice draws attention to the critical, but also the specifically spatial aspects of interdisciplinary processes operating between art and architecture. I discuss projects by practitioners muf and transparadiso, before reworking critical spatial practice for today, making reference to the performative and the temporal. I describe how performing interpretations of critical spatial practice through a situated criticism gave rise to my current practice of “site-writing”. A reading of May Mourn, a text-work which deals with the history of welfare state architecture, taken from my new book on transitional spaces, concludes by addressing the current London housing crisis.

Jane Rendell's work transcends architecture, art, feminism, history, and psychoanalysis. Rendell is Professor of Architecture and Art at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where she is Director of History & Theory. She has introduced the concepts of “critical spatial practice” and “site-writing” through authored books such as The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2016), Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002).
Co-edited collections include: Critical Architecture (2007), Spatial Imagination (2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000), Gender, Space, Architecture (1999), and Strangely Familiar (1995); as well as her new publications: "Giving an Account of Oneself: Architecturally", Journal of Visual Culture (2016); Silver (2017), a fictionella for Lost Rocks curated by Justy Phillips & Margaret Woodward; and with Michal Murawski, Reactivating the Social Condenser, co-edited special issue of The Journal of Architecture (forthcoming 2017).
More: http://www.janerendell.co.uk/

Supported by: ERSTE Foundation, MAO