Marking Feeling, Feeling Planning
A workshop and colloquium for the London Festival of Architecture 2019
Marking Feeling is a series of walking workshops developed and conducted throughout the group project of the RCA’s MRes Architecture cohort of 2018/19.
Reading about the workshop for Contour 9 Biennial might help better contextualising this one.
Among a colourful display of RCA MA Architecture end-of-year projects, we hosted a colloquium to share narratives of care in urban planning and architecture. As a continuation of a series of workshops developed during a group project in London and in the Contour 9 Biennial in Mechelen, Belgium, this workshop offered a space to reflect and think about feeling and space.
During this workshop, we kicked off the first half of the day with a colloquium. We began by a round of introductions, sharing keywords in relation to concepts of planning. We then formulated a series of questions that helped the session unravel, and that we kept in mind all throughout the workshop. Some of those questions that were raised and discussed were as follows:
How can we, and how do we use emotion and stories to respond to notions of institutionalised planning?
Is it possible to plan the unplanned?
How can we make space for the margins outside the actual ways of power?
What are we willing to unlearn?
Who are we planning for?
If authority holds the truth, who validates a language, and a feeling?
How are atmospheres spatialised feelings?
Mirror walk
We left the Workshop after enclosing a circle on the pavement with chalk. With a reflection tool we devised for the participants, we walked along Lambeth High Street with the mirror masks we developed, asking the participants to see beyond our own perspectives, and take the previous conversation and thoughts for this walk.
Moving in shared trust
Arriving in Old Paradise Park, the group divided into pairs. One of the partners closed their eyes, and the other one took care of him/her as they freely explored the surface. The idea was to experience the surroundings through the different senses, such as touch and listening rather than the vision. After ten minutes partners exchanged roles, so both had the opportunity to experience the role of taking care and being taken care of. During this exercise, some were crawling, some jumping, some walked far away, and others barely. We wrapped up with sharing experiences, and discussing how these simple gestures had shifted our perception and desires in regard to planning -even if only for the small scale of the space we had explored.
Marking Feeling
Unlike our workshop in Belgium, we left this activity to the end. After exercises of sensitisation and conversation, we asked the participants observe the space as leaving the park, and to mark it. They were to write down or draw directly in the surfaces of the place we were at, reflecting about the location of care and feeling in their recent urban experience. Locating thoughts and exposing them in the space, lead to a closing conversation in which all of the participants seemed replenished and relaxed, leaving stress behind, and taking a lot of awareness and thoughts to further unpack.
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// This event took place on June 28th, 2019 at The Workshop, Lambeth High Street, London, as part of the London Festival of Architecture 2019.
//Organising Committee:
Dr Adam Kaasa, Senior Research Tutor, School of Architecture, RCA;
Mariano Cuofano, Moritz Dittrich, Nuria Benítez Gómez, Ching-Hung Lin, and Wanying Li from the Masters in Research, School of Architecture, RCA
//Participants:
Caroline Yan Zheng, PhD Candidate, Information Experience Design & Fashion, RCA; Nick Bell, PhD Candidate, School of Communication, RCA; Nazneen Ayyub-Wood, Masters in Research, School of Art and Humanities, RCA; Bruna Ferreira Montuori, PhD Candidate, School of Architecture, RCA; Sophie Hardcastle, MA Situated Practice, Bartlett, UCL; Lucy Sabin, Masters in Research, School of Communication, RCA; Fernando Gutiérrez Hernández, PhD Candidate, Institute of the Americas/ Department of Geography, UCL; Claire M. Tunnacliffe, PhD Candidate, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL; Hamzah Al Asadulloh, MA School of Architecture, RCA; Cigdem Talu, PhD Candidate, Architecture History & Theory, McGill University, Montreal; Andrew Stuck, Rethinking Cities; and Maiia Sivtseva, MA by Project student at ARCSR, London Metropolitan University.
