Description of Activity
'Mapping the Space of Politics in Bristol through the Lens of the Protesting Crowd'The aim of this paper is to challenge the politics of urban representation and to propose new forms of mapping and perceiving the city by unpacking the imagery of the protesting crowd during the ‘Kill the Bill’ demonstrations, which took place between March and April 2021 in Bristol, UK. Using design-led research, this project sources evaluates, and categorises images and videos from the events as posted online to devise a series of city maps and models. These unconventional cartographies help decode the spatial, social, and cultural complexity of the city and reveal a new form of constructed ‘ground,’ one that emerges through the people’s concerns on their right to protest freely and without restrictions. With the media having entered the very definition of the self as well as the collective assembly, the crowd as a cinematic object becomes a device through which to understand the complex entanglements of bodies, technology, and the city, and to detach from homogenising and uniform urban visions. The embodied representations generated from this process reveal hidden and suppressed realities of the city and allow the marginal, the contingent, and even the accidental to come to the forefront. With the recurrent shifts across the media involved in this process (from photography to drawing to film to modelling and back...) and their subsequent superimpositions, the crowd emerges as an intermedia construction and as an agent that brings together people and the city in a performance of their socio-political context.
| Period | 30 Jun 2023 → 1 Jul 2023 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Location | London , United KingdomShow on map |