Performing The Body: the body as practice, the body as research

Led by Mitchell Squire, Architecture

This course will engage students in a series of creative investigations intending to deepen their understanding of our body’s capacities and limitations to chart new liberatory pathways for design practice. The types of work we will engage include but are not limited to the following: performance, installation, costume design, drawing, ethnographic fieldwork, portraiture, poetry, painting, video and painting, etc.

Students will be asked to consider the instrumentality of design disciplines and their potential for speculation on important issues shaping the world and its people, issues that are often held outside the boundaries of our disciplines. We will produce speculative and exhibition-quality work that tests our skills’ capacity. We will be charged with creating and performing in groups and solo utilizing our body and various found and/or made artifacts as mediums through which to deliberate on the culture, politics, and nuances of public, private, and institutional space. Bodies make spaces speak.

This studio will function, therefore, as an investigation of the relationship between embodied practices, social being, private actions (does performance require an audience?), and spatial production. Contemporary critical theories on the body, its materiality and form, its value and agency will be offered to provide us necessary grounding for our scholarly actions.

Throughout the semester, our foundational task is to be posing questions regarding the relationship between our bodies and material and spatial culture. We want to encourage innovative research that is academically rigorous and speculative, and which will yield imaginative and unconventional responses (NOT SOLUTIONS) to complex social, geographic, political, cultural, and environmental concerns. While viewing the world through the lens of design, we shall seek to re-define the agency of our disciplines for the future. A full range of representational modalities will be encouraged. There will be 3 -4 initial exercises followed by a comprehensive project speculative in nature.