Sympoietic Encounters

In this chapter, we conceive ‘poetic encounters’ as intra-actions constituting phenomena. These poetic encounters are rendered through choreographic practices as modes of engagement, of making/becoming, which we situate within feminist new materialist thinking and practices. For us, the ‘poetic’ embodies the political in its inherent relationship between aesthetic form and meaning – here we call upon Jacques Rancière and possible 're-distributions of the sensible' through our poetic encounters which query particular exclusionary practices.

We focus our attention on poetic encounters in the design process/produce of architecture. Architecture shares with other practices (including those of the everyday) the intertwined problems of binary thinking and anticipatory, future-oriented speculations. These are about remaining in disconnectedness, in separation: the separation of subject and object (and subject and subject, object and object…), of humans and other-than-humans, and the separation of ‘now’ and ‘then’. And it is our view that the ‘problems’ facing us all result from this adherence to this disconnectedness, be it climate catastrophe, military aggressions, species extinction, or inequalities. Of course, these problems are neither ‘caused’ nor ‘healed’ by spatial design; architecture is a collaborator in complex ecologies.

But architecture’s role is not insignificant, and here we explore modes of engagement, of making, which resonate with the relationality and connectedness of everything, with the ‘being-with’ of co-existence (with other humans, non-humans, animals, plants, the earth, weather, etc.), and being present.

Besides rendering our poetic encounters through new materialist thinking – particularly notions of intra-action, cutting-together-apart, and onto-ethico-epistemological – and Ranciere’s political philosophy, we diffract them through a relative of poetry, phronesis, – 'practical wisdom' used in living well –, which is, as Donald Polkinghorne explains,

‘Knowledge was understood to consist of facts learned from sensory experience or truths about the eternal objects. Phronesis is a different kind of knowledge: one that varies with situations, is receptive to particulars, and has a quality of improvisation.’

This chapter explores our making and understanding of poetic encounters through practices which include visual image making, bodily engagement, and various improvised means. It aims to develop improvisatory methods of ‘choreographic’ practice that engage with the presence of all bodies in spatial design and making and their interconnectedness with entangled material assemblages in order to critically engage with the exclusions of binary and anticipatory thinking and making, and ‘re-distribute the sensible.’