Place is location, but it’s also people, relationships, and memories, the site of things forgotten, suppressed or unrecorded, terrible and ordinary ways of being. The experience of people and peoples who have migrated, been displaced or exiled add further complexity to place: perhaps, an unshakeable orientation to elsewhere or a sense of in-betweenness; or, a simultaneous yet imperfect belonging to both here and there, to neither here nor there; an intermittent or constant feeling of being entirely out of place. What is a diasporic sense of place, how do we image or describe it, and how might it reimage space and place to define a territory for spatial practice?
This workshop is part of Self and Work, a series that began in 2018 as part of Experiments in Pedagogy at MIT Architecture. Self and Work centers the personal, the body, and lived experience as site of knowledge.
We will study work by authors and artists whose lives and works are profoundly influenced by their own relation to place. Forms that give direction to the semester project are: cartography, annotation, oral history, installation, film. An experimental approach to critique is central to the workshop and will be discussed and shaped as part of the process. Collaborative work will be encouraged.
Can Be Repeated for Credit
Yes