Description of Activity
Emergent grounds: Urban cartographies of Bristol through the lens of the protesting crowdThe 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.
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. The work is framed by formulations on the posthuman and the posturban: 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, the city, and its environment, and to detach from homogenizing and uniform urban visions. The recurrent shifts across the media involved in this process (from photography to drawing to film to modelling and back...) raise pertinent questions on the role of representation in the production of diverse narratives on the space of politics in the city.
| Period | 11 Nov 2022 → 12 Nov 2022 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Eindhoven , NetherlandsShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |