CFP: Spaces of Desire; remembrance and civic power

Submission deadline: March 4, 2016

Conference date(s):
June 30, 2016 - July 1, 2016

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Conference Venue:

School of Geography & Planning, and Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University
Cardiff, United Kingdom

Topic areas

Details

Remembrance pervades unchanging spaces commanding a static designation of affects that refuse to fold back from its signification to a condition of material change. Thus we may ‘remember’ a specified dead whilst making further dead, always with reference to the commemorated particularity. Our contentions are a radical rethinking of these spaces to re-configure their purpose for the production of a revolutionary passivism, negating discourses of risk, fear, and neo-liberal, universal, deceit. We encourage you to forget what you know, look at a space, countering its normativity and understand it from the point of a persona conducting themselves differently: a nomad, an outcast, a refugee etc.

A prevailing tendency is to consider public spaces as subservient to static mechanisms of remembrance and grand conceptual notions rather than the intimate conduct of the human condition. The aim of this conference is to explore the role of desire in experiencing and forming the urban context. Our objective is to construct an interdisciplinary forum concerned with post-linguistic theories, such as those developed by Deleuze & Guattari, Derrida and Foucault, de-stabilising, de-constructing de-territorialising knowledge in order to re-consider the current civic environment.

The purpose of the forum is to encourage a debate which would challenge research into space, place-making, and spatial design, as a field. We regard notions of space differently and reconstitute desire as the core of forming an understanding of places. We invite you to re-evaluate mundane and everyday urban spaces and articulate their full potential.

We seek to engage with narratives of spaces for the abnormal and more-than-human. Join us for a celebration of the mundane rendered avant-garde. Bring forth the movements, moments, transgressions and transformations. Show us the abject and abnormal, the dirt and underworld of the thing. We seek the poetic assemblage of dystopia and intangibility, temporal rupture and material stabilities.

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