Altering Practices

Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space

Doina Petrescu, Doina Petrescu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134325320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

This collection of essays addresses and defines the state of contemporary theories and practices of space: it is concerned with the growing importance of technology and communications, the effects of globalization and the change of social demands. Within the current urban and geopolitical contexts, it addresses the emergence of new social and political theories that raise questions of identity and difference in modern society. The book reiterates feminist concerns with space from the critical stance of the new millennium.

With contributions from the leading theorists and thinkers from around the world representing the fields of architecture, art, philosophy and gender studies, this book has a truly international and interdisciplinary reach.

Chapter 1
ALTERING PRACTICES

Doina Petrescu

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

Rosi Braidotti

Judith Butler

Geraldine Pratt and Pauline Hanson

bell hooks

Jacques Rancière

Becomings, yearnings

The Altering practices based their meaning on Alterities. They both refer to alter – the Latin word for ‘other’ – more as a verb than a noun. They speak about making or becoming different, about change, a change that could relate to time or directly to gender.¹ In a Deleuzian language, Altering practices are ‘becomings’; they are ‘active, dynamic processes of thinking and transformation, and an affirmation of “difference” as a positive quality’. This notion of ‘becoming’ has already been appropriated by the contemporary feminist project. Feminist thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti or Elisabeth Grosz have theorised the feminist subject as ‘a term in a process of intersecting forces [affects], spatio-temporal variables that are characterized by their mobility, changeability, and transitory nature’.² Becomings are ‘ways of establishing concrete material and semiotic connections among subjects that are conceived in terms of a multiplicity of forces/affects’.³

While the logic of ‘becoming’ may offer the potential for an infinite variety of constellations, forming and reforming in perpetual change, specific ‘becomings’ are always located, they are always fostered by their particular situation, historically, materially and critically.

Understood in these terms, the present book maps a particularly located and materialised transformation of the contemporary feminist project in architecture but also, as Francesca Hughes notices in her chapter, a certain becoming of the architectural theory and practice in general.

The Altering practices are named after the process they induce, by what they do. They rely on the transformative power of ‘altering’, on both its positive and critical dynamics. In the syntagm ‘altering practices’, ‘altering’ could mean ‘undermining’, ‘subverting’ received identities and authoritative rules, norms and tools and working out other shared meanings throughout their transformation; it could also be an appeal to yearning. ‘Yearning’, this gift made to theory by the black feminism, combines hope, moaning and desire, everything that a soul hungers for and is powerless to define, that which will transform the soul rather than be appropriated by it. It brings a sense of immanence that, instead of overcoming contradictions, enables us to slip through them. As bell hooks has put it, the question of ‘yearning’ is not ‘who we are’ but ‘what we want to become’; the Altering practices are about what we want the world to become…⁴

Collective re-constructions

Altering practices have taken further the ‘mop-up work’ begun by their predecessors into a multiplicity of figurations, a number of gestures, figures and actions that constitute the spectrum of these practices in this volume: ‘urban curating’, ‘making space’, ‘taking place’, ‘urban cooking’, ‘drifting walls’, ‘mapping invisible privileges’, ‘confessional constructions’…

They are accompanied by a collection of concepts and metaphors: chaos, complexity, fluidity, emergence, lightness, connectionism, multiplicity, networks, self-organisation… We realised that most of the paradigms that structure our contemporary thinking of space have been shaped by the feminist imaginary. But most of them have been brought into theory and practice through technologically and scientifically rooted discourses, losing their poetical and political dimensions. Contributions to this book, such as those by Francesca Hughes, Jennifer Bloomer or Sadie Plant, try to re-appropriate such paradigms. They define the Altering practices as gestures of discursive re-appropriation of theoretical territories and actions that frame the contemporary understanding of space.

This act of re-appropriation within a feminist project has to do with knowledge construction and knowledge politics. A political approach to knowledge means, in feminist terms:

a delicate and implicated re-construction of its processes, the search of the links and relations between many different elements often irreducible one to another. In feminism, this gaze into knowledge is informed by confidence on collective re-constructions, not only on theoretical deconstructions.⁵

These collective reconstructions, in our case, suppose ways of doing and undoing, ways of making and remaking space, of ‘producing space’ according to ‘altered’ rules and values. These ways are both political and poetic.

We can also talk about Altering practices as practices of ‘curating’, of ‘care taking’, acknowledging the work of reconstruction and re-production that bears ethical and emotional charge, the kind of work that was always associated with women. Authors in this volume talk about the importance of memory and genealogies in practices of ‘urban curating’ (Meike Schalk), ‘making space’ (Matrix), ‘urban cooking’ (Kim Trogal), ‘civic performance’ (Ilana Salama Ortar), ‘detailing’ (Helen Stratford), ‘drawing “otherhow”’ (Katie Lloyd Thomas), ‘mapping invisible privileges’ (muf), ‘confessional constructions’ (Jane Rendell), ‘counter-representations of difference’ (Marion von Osten), ‘stepping on stray sods’ (Brigid McLeer), ‘longing’ and ‘standing in for matter/mater’ (Jennifer Bloomer and Francesca Hughes), ‘building clouds and drifting walls’ (Ruth Morrow).

Otherhow

These reconstructions also affect the subjects themselves, constituting at the same time, as Butler has argued, subversions of identitary constructions. The Altering practices are altering identities and re-territorialising domains that no longer correspond to traditional categorisations. Chapters in this volume reveal different kinds of practices of writing, teaching, building, planning or art that are breaking barriers between theories and practices, academia and activism and enabling new coalitions between different intellectual, aesthetic and political positions. They are subverting the critical division between ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’, emphasising the embodied character of the production of theory and the reflexive and situated approach to practice. Katie Lloyd

Thomas talks in her piece about ways of working that can escape the straitjacket of being ‘for’ or ‘against’ and produce unknown outcomes, which can exceed these oppositions. She uncovers the importance within feminist practices of shifting from ‘practices of the other’, to practising ‘otherhow’.

Ruth Morrow’s piece is about an ‘otherhow’ pedagogy in architecture, which allows students to learn from outside (of academia), and from others (than architects and teachers). This pedagogy for the first years emphasises the creativity of the everyday life and asks students to keep alive their memory of being ordinary users.

She also addresses architecture and architectural education as ‘contested’ domains, and proposes alterative ways to reconceptualise them as processes of managing conflicts rather than necessarily trying always to resolve them.

A number of articles in Altering practices also propose an ‘otherhow’ approach to technology, a materialist thinking of technology from a perspective which places the body in critical continuity with the technological realm. Some of the authors, such as Niran Abbas, continue the critique of feminist science theorists such as Donna Haraway, and reconsider the relationship between the body-politics and the techno-science politics. The contributions of Francesca Hughes, Jennifer Bloomer or Sadie Plant address the interactions between matter, technology and the body through limitations and sustainability of the transformations they provoke: material, psychical, affective, social, environmental.

Ways of (be)longing

The contributors look at these transformations as embodied genealogies. They are interested in both where they belong to and how they become. For example, Sadie, Jennifer and Francesca point out the repression of matter and materiality within Modern architecture and theory and its ‘return’ in the contemporary architectural discourse. Given the traditional association between matter and mater, this kind of repression could obviously be related to the political repression of women’s contribution to Western culture. Francesca and Sadie are reconstructing the legacies and filiations of this ‘return’ of ‘matter’ in contemporary discourses on space and architecture, convoking also the return of ‘mothers’ by mentioning, for example, Jennifer Bloomer’s early work on ‘dirt’, ‘formless’ and ‘ornament’ in architecture, and that of Irigaray on ‘fluidity’ in philosophy. Jennifer’s piece in the book shows how all belonging is rooted in a longing, which always acts in a realm defined by the matter/mater politics.

Discussing issues of identity and embodiment within technology and cyberspace, Niran draws attention in her chapter to the patriarchal tensions existing in any form of socio-cultural product, and the need to situate female subjectivity within a gendered and politicised context in the cybercultural matrix. The fusion of machine and organism becomes a progressive and transgressive site for political activity only if it involves the deconstruction of ‘incompatible’ frames of reference.

Ruth’s pedagogy emphasises the importance of opening up the architectural education to other disciplines and processes and observes how, when internal dialogues are exposed, the reactions of others enrich the meaning and progression of these dialogues. This pedagogy prepares nomadic practitioners in architecture, who act by questioning the traditional hierarchies between client, architect and builder and by multiplying relationships and fluidities within the architectural processes.

Meike Schalk discusses ‘connectionist practices’ and how, by borrowing methodologies from other domains and collaborations, urban designers could act as ‘curators’, as creators of meaning through unusual and unexpected connections, rather than ‘planners’ who impose their patronising meaning on space.

The practices of collective reconstruction need maps and tools to read the new and rapidly changing spatiality...