Patience in placemaking

Dance and everyday living could be said to be a set of performative events that engage with the act of living and living well. Through the practice of inhabiting a place, 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. Similarly, dance, it can be argued, enables a settling in of self, in the body. In this way the production of space shifts, from the abstract thinking of the architectural drawing board and design studio to the practice of living – to everyday actions, artefacts and materials. 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 architecture from boldness of design to the immensity of the ordinary and everyday.

Feminist philosopher Karen Barad argues that, “representationalism ... separates the world into the ontologically disjunct domains of words and things…” Architectural representation and its production processes are sedimented with binary thinking such as male/female, inside/outside, subject/object. Architectural drawing practices perform through a particular set of actions that are sedimented with abstract thinking. They engage with representationalism through distance and separation. Methods of production that have not changed since the Renaissance period. Through an interdisciplinary conversation this paper develops alternative drawing practices to refigure the way interiors - the spaces that we daily inhabit are produced and experienced.