Topological Atlas (London) and Arazi Assembly (Mardin) Online Seminar Series
March - July 2021
Field as Patchy, Violence as Temporality
Speakers: Lorenzo Pezzani, Elizabeth Povinelli, Macarena Gomez - Barris, Helene Kazan, Ola Hassanian, Shourideh C.Molavi, Ram Bhatt, Yaminay Chaudhry, Saad Amira.
Moderators: Nishat Awan, Ishita Sharma, Ruken Aydogdu, Pelin Tan.
Our research and practices are located within contested zones and border areas that are subject to militarised violence, occupation, surveillance, and colonial extraction. In such areas the hard strata of spatial violence – infrastructural, extractive, territorial – often become overexposed. How do we work within such conditions, recognizing the implications of violence, but resisting the urge to think of violence as the sole spatial analytic? Considering violence beyond the spectacular and within a slower temporality might require modes of research that go beyond the investigative or evidentiary. We might instead work with multiple narratives and temporalities and consider violence as a form of seepage, exhaustion, or dispersion. Thinking through the material, affective and atmospheric qualities of conflict zones might also require other forms of thinking and doing that make room for the faint web of sedimenting relationalities that endure in place and produce a form of worlding within and in-between the hard strata of territorial forces?
We understand the field as a thick surface with a depth and texture that can only be apprehended as patchy and partial. Referring to anthropologist Anna Tsing and her colleagues’ concept of ‘patchy Anthropocene we are interested in how the uneven distribution of the effects of transforming territories are intensified within contested zones whose opacity narrows our field of vision and reduces our capacities to listen. How can engaged and aesthetic practices enable other modes of seeing and listening across landscapes that are often constructed as out-of-bounds by state and other actors? We hope to discuss what could be the contemporary decolonial practices in extractive infrastructures and controlled zones. This seminar series invites academics and practitioners across disciplines of architecture, social sciences, and contemporary art whose research is placed in the trans-local South. These include: giving decolonial voices: Lorenzo Pezzani, Elizabeth Povinelli, Macarena Gomez - Barris, Helene Kazan, Ola Hassanian, Shourideh C.Molavi, Ram Bhatt, Yaminay Chaudhry, Saad Amira.
The seminar series is organized as part of an ongoing collaboration between Arazi Assembly (Mardin) and Topological Atlas (London).
All information regarding online links and further please follow: https://padlet.com/mardin2021/