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30 Sep 2021
Urgent Pedagogies Issue#2 launch

IASPIS is announcing the Urgent Pedagogies Issue#2: Urgencies, and invites you to the launch. Together with invited guests we will share experiences on decolonial practice and discourses, from diverse continents and argumentations on multiple scales of institutional urgencies.

There are many local and historical conditions that influence and urge contemporary and future needs of critical practices. Each planetary scale of territories fosters its own urgencies in response to conflict, racism, segregation, settler colonialism, climate crisis and struggles for indigenous rights. How is it possible to engage in such histories and current local struggles through pedagogical platforms, initiatives and advocacy? How can multiple scales of colonial pressure be mapped and how can modalities of artistic and design practices react? How can the learning environment be a safe zone of and for counter-constructions? How does collective learning empower communality? This issue brings forward practitioners, authors and researchers that discuss urgencies through different cases and modalities of learning and unlearning.

Participants include Malkit Shoshan, María do Mar Castro Varela, Saphira Shure, Ana María León, Andrew Herscher, Tom Holert, Mauricio Corbalán, Pio Torroja and Ou Ning, introduction and moderation by Pelin Tan and Magnus Ericson.

Video documentation, Urgent Pedagogies Issue#2 launch, 30 September 2021

Programme

Welcome and Introduction
Magnus Ericson and Pelin Tan

Part 1: Perspectives
Modalities of design activism
Presentation by Malkit Shoshan

Part 2: Reflections
Short interventions by María do Mar Castro Varela, Saphira Shure, Ana María León, Andrew Herscher, Tom Holert, Mauricio Corbalán and Ou Ning, moderation by Pelin Tan.

Participants
Malkit Shoshan 

is an architect, researcher, writer, curator and educator based in New York. She’s the founding director of the architectural think-tank FAST: Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory. FAST uses research, advocacy, and design to investigate the relationships between architecture, urban planning, and human rights. Its cross-disciplinary and multi-scalar work explores the mechanisms behind, and the impact of systemic and spatial violence on people’s living environments and livelihood. FAST develops collaborative initiatives and designs to promote spatial and social justice. She is currently Area Head of the Art, Design, and the Public Domain Master in Design Studies at Harvard GSD and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU. She’s the author of numerous books and publications including Atlas of Conflict: Israel-Palestine (Uitgeverij 2010, 2010), Zoo, or the letter Z, just after Zionism (NAiM, 2012), Drone. UNMANNED. Architecture and Security Series (DPR-Barcelona, 2016-2018), Retreat. UNMANNED. Architecture and Security Series (DPR-Barcelona, 2020) and the co-author of the book Village. One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise (Damiani Editore, 2014). In 2016 Malkit Shoshan was the curator of the Dutch Pavilion for The Venice Architecture Biennale with the exhibition BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions, which examines the spatiality and legacy of UN Peace Operations in conflict-affected urban environments. In 2021, she won The Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for her collaborative project Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip: Watermelon, Sardines, Crabs, Sand, and Sediment.

María do Mar Castro Varela

is a professor of Pedagogy and Social Work at the Alice Salomon University in Berlin. She holds a double degree in Psychology and Pedagogy and a Ph.D. in Political Science. Her research interests besides Postcolonial Theory lies in Queer Studies, Critical Migration Studies, Critical (Adult-)Education, Conspiracy theories, and Trauma Studies. In 2014 she was a visiting fellow of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities in Melbourne, Australia, in 2015/16 a senior fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and will be the Ustinov-Guest-Professor at the University of Vienna in winter 2021/22. María do Mar Castro Varela is the chair of the Berlin Institute for Contrapunctual Social Analysis (BIKA) and the founder of the bildungsLab* in Berlin.

Saphira Shure

is a postdoctoral research associate at the Faculty of Education at Bielefeld University. Her research focuses on racism and critical education as well as questions of difference and hegemony. One of the main concerns in her research is the analysis of educational institutions regarding their power structure and exclusionary practices. She also works on postcolonial perspectives and knowledge production. Saphira has been a member of the bildungsLab* since 2017.

Ana María León

is an architect and a historian of objects, buildings, and landscapes. Her work studies how spatial practices of power and resistance shape the modernity of the Americas. León teaches at the University of Michigan and is co-founder of several collaborations laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history including the Decolonizing Pedagogies Workshop, Nuestro Norte es el Sur, and the Settler Colonial City Project. She has co-organized several teacher-to-teacher workshops exploring architectural history’s relationship to intersectional feminism, the global, the South, decolonization, and antiracism. Her book, Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires, was recently published by the University of Texas Press.

Andrew Herscher

endeavors to bring research on architecture and cities to bear on struggles for rights, justice, and democracy across a range of global sites. He is co-founding member of a series of militant research collaboratives including the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective, Detroit Resists, and the Settler Colonial City Project; he is also co-founder of the Decolonizing Pedagogies Workshop at the University of Michigan, where he teaches.  Among his books are Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010), The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2012), Displacements: Architecture and Refugee (Sternberg Press, 2017), and The Global Shelter Imaginary: Ikea Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief, co-authored with Daniel Bertrand Monk (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).

Tom Holert

works as an independent scholar and curator. He authored and co-authored various books and organized exhibitions—most recently, Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 (with Anselm Franke), and Education Shock. Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, both at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. In 2015 he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. Recent book publications include Knowledge Beside Itself. Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics Sternberg Press, 2020) and Politics of Learning, Politics of Space. Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s (De Gruyter, 2021).

Mauricio Corbalán and Pio Torroja (m7red)

are architects working and living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Both studied architecture and urbanism at the FADU-UBA (Argentina) in the late eighties. From 1999 till 2004 they were founders and members of “m777”, an architect’s collective working on the fringes of the professional field. In 2005 they founded m7red.

M7red is an independent research network and activist group focused on building tools and methodologies for the description of complex scenarios and empowering people to deal with changes and developments in public space. M7red works closely with citizens, particularly marginalised groups disproportionately impacted by spatial injustice. From 2009 to 2014, m7red took part in a hacker-space making open data platform to tackle environmental problems like the polluted Matanzas Riachuelo river basin. In 2016 they published Mil cuencas, an e-book about the research on Buenos Aires river basins. Between 2016 – 18, together with Forensic Architecture, m7red took part in a collaborative investigation about “Sandra”, the first captive orangutan to be granted non-human rights at the Buenos Aires Zoo. In 2018 m7red set up the Laboratory for Territorial Technologies to accompany an excluded workers’ union (MTE) in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. M7red has developed projects and collaborations with Jeanne van Heeswijk, raumlabor – berlin, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Transit Labour, Tomas Saraceno and Forensic Architecture. Its works have been exhibited at the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre (Brazil), The APAP project 2010 in Seoul (ROK), the 3rd Design Biennale in Istanbul (Turkey) and at IASPIS in Stockholm in 2018.  Since 2019, m7red has been a contributor to The Funambulist Magazine and in 2020 they

Ou Ning

is an artist, film maker, curator, writer, publisher and activist based in Jingzhou, China. He is the director of the documentaries San Yuan Li (2003) and Meishi Street (2006); chief curator of the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (2009); jury member of 8th Benesse Prize at 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); member of the Asian Art Council at the Guggenheim Museum (2011); founding chief editor of the literary journal Chutzpah!(2010-2014); founder of the Bishan Project (2011-2016); a visiting professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (2016-2017); and a senior research fellow of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research in Boston (2019-2021). His collected writings Utopia in Practice: Bishan Project and Rural Reconstruction is recently published by Palgrave Macmillan (2020).

Magnus Ericson

is a Project Manager at IASPIS, responsible for the design, crafts and architecture related programme. He has a background as curator, project coordinator and educator. Between 2014 and 2018 he developed and managed two experimental postgraduate courses on socially-engaged critical practice; Sites and Situations and Organising Discourse, at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm. Between 2009 and 2014 Magnus Ericson was a Senior Advisor/Coordinator and Curator for a new design-related programme at Arkdes, Sweden´s National Center for Architecture and Design, in Stockholm. Between 2007 and 2009 he was assigned as a Project Manager at IASPIS to pursue and develop the activities within the fields of design, crafts and architecture. Together with Ramia Maze he was the author and co-editor of DESIGN ACT Socially and politically engaged design today – critical roles and emerging tactics (Berlin, Sternberg Press 2011).

Pelin Tan

is the 6th recipient of the Keith Haring Art and Activism and fellow of Bard College of the Human Rights Program and Center for Curatorial Studies, NY, 2019-2020. She is a sociologist, art historian and currently Professor, Fine Arts Faculty, Batman University, Turkey. Tan is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research, Boston; and researcher at the Architecture Faculty, University of Thessaly, Volos (2020-2025). She is the co-curator of the Cosmological Gardens project by CAD+SR and she was the curator of the Gardentopia project of Matera ECC 2019. Tan, was a Postdoctoral fellow on Artistic Research at ACT Program, MIT 2011; and a Phd scholar of DAAD Art History, at Humboldt Berlin University, 2006. Her field research was supported by The Japan Foundation, 2011; Hong Kong Design Trust, 2016, CAD+SR 2019. She was a guest professor at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 2021; Visiting Professor at School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2016 and at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus, 2018. Between 2013 and 2017 she was an Associate Professor of the Architecture Faculty at Mardin Artuklu University. She is a member of Imece refugee Solidarity Association and co-founder of Imece Academy; advisor of The Silent University and the pedagogical consortium of Dheisheh Palestinian Refugee Camp, Palestine. In 2008 she was an IASPIS grantholder.

EDITED BY
Magnus Ericson
LAST UPDATED
12-06-2021

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