Body Matters AHRA2024 International Conference

Description of Activity

Disrupting Architectural Drawing through Choreographic Practices.

This workshop draws on the collaborative explorations of three practitioners from interior architecture, choreography, and site-specific dance, exploring how embodied
movement practice disrupts and enlivens architectural drawing and spatial design. Through practices of inhabitation, we continually arrange and rearrange everyday artefacts such as food, tables, chairs, photographs, or pebbles on a beach; this rearrangement provides a sense of settled-in living where spaces are produced through everyday actions. Through site-based movement practice, the clean line of the architectural pen and roll of white paper is replaced by drawings/actions/ movements that assemble and rearrange material relations, shifting the language of architectural drawing towards the immensity of the ordinary. Informed by feminist new materialisms (Barad, Haraway, Braidotti), site-dance praxis and theory (Akinleye, Taylor, Brown), dance improvisatory practices (De Spain, Duck, Midgelow), and architectural and spatial theory (Massey, Manning, Rendell), the workshop draws on the facilitators’ iterative dialogue developed through their exploration of LiDAR data collected from Wymering Manor – a sixteenth-century house in Cosham. Exploration of this data involved moving with scanned LiDAR images taken from the site, displayed within the walls of the University of Portsmouth’s CCIXR studio’s SmartStage. Moving with the data combined with markmaking and drawing as a mode of embodied response. This collaborative process led to research questions that frame and inform the workshop design: How are bodies (of matter, movement, and material) entangled in this process? How does this movement practice produce ephemeral, mobile substantiations and fleeting contacts with surfaces, skeins, and materials? How does this work implicate drawing and dance in vulnerable constructions riddled with holes and vacuoles in which processes of collapse, decay, ruination, and preservation pervade? The session will include: an introductory overview of the facilitators’ praxis; a site-based movement and drawing session (for all abilities / levels of experience); post-practice discussion and evaluation of the movement/drawing practice.

Period	22 Nov 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Norwich, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International