Calum Rennie's Affective Reformations
A selection of curated media lists from our global community
words – calum rennie
location – edinburgh, scotland
A few months have passed now since we gathered at Collective Architecture’s Glasgow studio for an evening spent around a text, a prompt and a loose set of references and documentation to discuss, sound out, challenge and make sense of together. On invitation from, and alongside, boom saloon, Civic Soup – an interdisciplinary collective whose work invites an expanded sense of public realm – produced Affective Reformations.
“Spaces carry us. Spaces hold our livelihoods and shape our identities. Spaces can move, transition, hide and surveil. Unless actively involved in the formulation of our environments, their effects on our everyday lives can often go unnoticed – whilst at other moments becoming immediately explicit and urgent.”
The event organised around the ‘reading circle’ – a format of enquiry and collective thought that Civic Soup have adopted and continue to develop throughout our work over the past years – to reflect on and reassess an article from the boom saloon archive. Natural Wonder, from Issue 004, appraises the work of artist Donald Urquhart throughout his career so far.
We circled and unravelled this text with a group of participants assembled from design professionals, art makers, critics and cultural thinkers. Reading aloud in-turn, a broad discussion emerged on the role of artistic practices in design processes, how space affects and is affected by those that inhabit it, who holds control over its making, and why.
The references listed below constitute a small sampling of texts and thinking that informed the discussion. They are loose, disparate and certainly inexhaustive, but pool a multidisciplinary range of perspectives – making and being from various voices at various scales between the individual and the collective. They reveal the malleable, sensorial and transgressive field of happenings, engagements and actions through which we construct spatial understanding.
01_Natural Wonder, Donald Urquhart, boom saloon Issue 004
Urquhart is an artist with a long standing engagement with the creation and sense-making of space; operating outside of, and in collaboration with, architectural and design professions. This article is an appraisal of his practice and work so far. It considers several of his projects – in particular those in healthcare settings concerned with healing and convalescence – and in doing so reveals broader questions of how our environments are generated, what they hold for us and alongside us, and the ways in which these formulations affect our being. This text formed the primary reading from which we reflected collectively during the session.
02_Time Spent by Windows is Time Well Spent, Renske Maria van Dam, Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection
“It is from this reservoir of subtle realities and the awareness of the reciprocity between inside and outside, between mind, body, and environment, that I start writing this essay.”
Shifting lines that project forward and backwards into the present slip between architect, artist and academic Maria van Dam’s considerations of perception and reflected imaginations; not only a means to more conscious architectural experiences – and by extension everyday life – but a key tool in the “soft practice” of planning and realising space in contemporary contexts. The work of creating futures is, and must be, a haptic, bodily one; finding direct engagements with the material world through sensory intrigue. This essay highlights smaller modulations that can be taken in our immediate environments, through the power of spatial attunement, to make and change space as individual and collective agents.
03_Street, Sara Hendren, What Can a Body do? How We Meet the Built World
It is through constructed measures and instruments that we aid our minds to visualise and navigate physical space. In this text, artist, design researcher, teacher and writer Hendren recounts the collaborative project work of artist Wendy Jacobs with a young, autistic man with a deep interest in mapping – met by chance at a birthday party – from 2008 onward. It is a prompt and a reminder that our common means of spatial cognition are rarely common in their accessibility, and by no means exhaustive. These will always attribute value, privileging certain minds and bodies over others; certainty in their neutrality as sole or primary frameworks of understanding in our early development and formal education should be shaken loose.
04_On Interiority, Inhibition and Dancing Solo, Isabelle Bucklow, interview with Gillian Wearing, Motor, Issue 1: The Solo
Upon witnessing a woman dancing alone and wholly arrhythmically throughout a musical performance – seemingly incongruous to the norms of her social environment – artist Gillian Wearing conceived Dancing in Packham, a video work performed and filmed by her in the 90s. In this short interview reflecting on the work, the discussion reflects on its inception and recounts its inquiry into the boundaries of interiority and exteriority drawn by the behaviours of bodies in social and public space – in turn troubling the unspoken social contracts of how we perform selfhoods in response to our surroundings.
What agency is bestowed and what excusals are made by the dynamics of defining artists, performers and viewers, now further confused by contemporary technological bridges that now exist in real time between them?
05_The Choreography of Everyday Life, Anne-B Parson
Exploring the quotidian social choreographies of urban environments, choreographer Parson’s short book frames these daily excursions through the spatio-temporal sensibilities of movement and formal dance disciplines. She considers how we construct narratives and meaning as means of navigating the dense contexts of urban space whilst consistently pressed up against others’ interiorities – overhearing and embroiling in lives filled with their own noises, objects and atmospheres.
Cut through with snapshots that present a dialogue of Parson’s immediate family relations and home sphere, this filmic sequence of text and reference images itself registers a dynamic between internal character and performed public-self.
06_The Human Auditorium, Ross Brown, On Listening
Artist, composer, academic and writer Brown swiftly glosses three sonic scenes in this short essay considering spaces in which we encounter sound; those within the body whilst navigating the city, outwith between trees in a forest, and within the highly attuned architecture of an outdoor classical theatre.
Illustrated in turn are the tools and technologies we have employed to mediate the effects of these spatial conditions on our experiences and ability to navigate through, around or stay present within specific environments. From this thinking, we might step out to consider where our own sound-making – that is being alive in our bodies – figures into our surroundings and materially affects perceptions of shared space and where our senses coalesce.
07_Super Normal Design for Extra Ordinary Bodies: A Design Manifesto, Atelier of Disability Design and Culture
After troubling the models of disability as understood within contemporary culture, this manifesto consequently broadens the definition of the body, specifically the standardised body, and how it is perceived by a public gaze.
Although focusing on a suite of everyday objects, considered through the definitions of ‘Super Normal’ and ‘Extra Ordinary,’ we might further imply how these objects enable or dis-able specific engagements with space, how that is perceived within shared environments, and how then might these principles factor into the generation of new spaces or in the modification of old?
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