Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on a range of pedagogical approaches I have been using with performance students, inviting them to engage with the daily life of public spaces in Johannesburg and to develop responses to their engagements through their artistic performance practice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on a range of pedagogical approaches I have been using with performance students, inviting them to engage with the daily life of public spaces in Johannesburg and to develop responses to their engagements through their artistic performance practice. The starting place for the research is a participatory engagement with the "now" of the city through a heightened awareness of students' own daily routes and activities and through interviews with other city-dwellers in public spaces. The second phase of performance development invites a dialoguing with the "everyday knowledges" of the urban engaged with in the first phase. The realisation of an artistic performances as response facilitates a broadcasting of these everyday knowledges, as well as initiating imaginaries, subtly or radically alternative, for urban pasts, presents and futures. This process serves a democratisation of knowledges of the ever-evolving urban, with specific attention to Johannesburg as a southern African city, through focusing on the everyday experiences of student artist-researchers and the fellow city dwellers they encounter, as well as through using a research communication medium outside of conventional academic media and arenas and more accessible to broader publics. The presentation offers a brief explication of this process in a conventional presentation style, followed by the facilitation of panel attendees in a truncated version of the process described, giving a sense of the specific methods within each phase, how the process unfolds on an embodied level and the kinds of research "outputs" and insights the process produces.

Paper short abstract:

Reflecting on pedagogical practices from a Sonic urbanism(s) seminar, this paper draws upon urban sonic dérives that illustrate a shift from hearing the city as a cognitive process of comprehension to listening as an active pedagogical and analytical process of speculation and imagination.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on experimental pedagogical practices from a Critical Urbanisms Seminar entitled Sonic urbanisms: Sound, mobilities, culture and identity convened by the University of Basel and University of Cape Town. In the seminar we sought to explore the sonic aspects of Cape Town and its acoustic territories shaped through movements, circulations, and encounters. By experimenting with methods of listening to an African urban environment we offer insights to citiness developed through ‘sonic dérives’—building on the concept from the Situationist International—that allowed our pedagogical process to drift with sounds: following, sampling, tracing. In this paper we seek to demonstrate firstly how our sonic dérives highlight emotional and affective relationships with urban space; and secondly, how our experiments shift us from hearing the city as a cognitive process of comprehension to listening as an active pedagogical and analytical process of speculation and imagination, straining towards possible meaning that is not immediately accessible. The outcomes of our sonic dérives illustrate how sound casts long spatial and temporal shadows, spreading across an acoustic territory without neat boundaries while also disrupting linear notions of past, present and future in the life of the African city through sonic connections to memories and desires. Through our experiments in sonic urbanism(s) the city is rendered in mobile acoustic territories that are fluid, ephemeral and intersecting as evidenced by a sonic map of Cape Town providing a multi-layered soundscape that is made visible and audible.

Paper short abstract:

Images are relational objects. They depict reality, create reality, and act back on reality. This intervention is based on the game "Memory" and explores different ways in which different kinds of images, physical and mental, influence our way of seeing and making the world.

Paper long abstract:

The game "Memory" aims at training your visual memory. There are different sets of 2 identical images that need to be identified and paired as the images are uncovered one by one. This intervention is taking these basic rules as a framework and expands them in multiple ways and directions, engaging the participants in a multilayered conversation that starts from and leads back to images. It is allowing to engage on both, cognitive and emotional levels, question the status of the images as reproducers, creators, and influencers of reality, and creating new unforeseen worlds and visual narratives. It is a conversation and an experimental exploration of worldmaking with and through images that allow the participants to unlearn, engage and relate. The outcome of the intervention is not pre-defined, it could be anything from a collage or a map to a performance or a video.

Paper short abstract:

This research studio was designed to provoke the boundaries of radical thinking by inviting students to act as facilitators for a unique and individual experiment. The underpinning inquiry revolved around the productivities inherent in the mechanisms of absurdism and the process of policy making.

Paper long abstract:

This research studio was designed to provoke and test the boundaries of radical thinking by inviting students to act as facilitators for a unique and individual experiment. The underpinning inquiry, which revolved around the productivities inherent in the mechanisms of absurdism and the process of policy making, was catalysed by two questions:

a. In what ways could prevailing city planning and associated policy-making become a lens to explore absurdity?

b. Could absurdity, understood through it's theoretical framing, be useful as a lens to explore planning processes, policy making and urban practices?

Students were tasked with selecting an urban planning policy intervention in the City of Cape Town as material to explore absurdist theory. Their inquiries were guided by the following prompts:

• Can Urban Planning be understood as performance? And, given the legacy and intransigence of spatial injustice, is this performance rooted in the absurd?

• What emerged when policy and planning were routed through the mechanism/s of absurdity?

• What was the theoretical/conceptual construct of absurdity for their (individual) inquiry?

• What evidence emerged from processing planning/policy as theoretical declarations and/or as conceptual provocations?

• In what ways did prevailing urban planning policies resemble a board game?

• In what ways could absurdity become a speculative tool?

Students were encouraged to make evident their learning in the form of a conceptual artwork.

This research studio was run in person, over a six week period in April 2020, after a period of total physical isolation due to the global pandemic.

Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on courses which centre African watery bodies as a starting point to work through urban and architectural histories and futures, globally. Watery viewpoints disrupt the idea of origins, prompting thinking with entangled relationships across time, space, surface and depth.

Paper long abstract:

'Ocean as archive' is part of a series of architectural humanities courses run in 2022/2023 which asked students to consider how centering African engagements with water - oceans, seas, estuaries and rivers among other bodies of water - might be a starting point for thinking though urban and architectural histories and futures. Watery viewpoints ask us to look beyond points of origin, drawing on Edouard Glissant, to archipelagic and entangled relationships across time and space, surface and depth. Movement across water has been key to trade and commerce, resulting in risky, fruitful and dangerous encounters formative for built environments- from the oceanic catastrophes of the Atlantic slave trade to early global empires in the Swahili seas; Urban waterways have been tools of extraction and sites of leisure; Managing water through floodplains, land reclamation initiatives, and the construction of dams, ports and canals have been central to modernisation and development projects globally, implicated in structures of racial capitalism. In our current times, thinking with water raises urgent questions around devastating floods, creeping sea-level rise, infrastructural failure, and the increasing vulnerability of coastal communities -and asks student to question the role of the built environment in responding to these conditions. In this paper I will reflect on the first year of this course and share a range of work produced by students, which draws on critical archival and decolonial approaches to engage with speculative fiction, oral history and trans-oceanic photographic archives as a means to speak to alternative pasts and futures.