Voiced Space: Re-signify City

Date & Time 

Thursday, June 24  |  19:00-21:00 CEST, 13:00-15:00 EDT, 03:00-05:00 AEST

 

Description

How to read the cityscape granting visibility and recognition to voices and histories previously silenced?

As we cross the city with our quotidian practices, it is often all too easy to overlook the palimpsest of contested past that surrounds us. It is necessary to create tools to re-read the city with awareness and intention.

When reading a territory with historical, postcolonial awareness which voices are prioritized and which excluded?
How to read the cityscape considering global interactions and deeply embedded power relations?
And how is this present in the construction of the cityscape in its current conditions of segregation?

“Voiced Space: Re-signify City” focuses on fostering memory-making and processing through the development of innovative, participatory methods that do not physically touch the spaces involved. Such tools allow to critically engage with monuments, heritage sites and multi-layered urban landscapes.

In the context of growing awareness and broadening debates, attention to the cityscape’s blindness to silenced memories is increasing, especially in relation to how different people experience the urban environment. There is the need to reckon with the polyphonic nature of cities, with their composite outlook which calls for an inclusive heritage.

“Voiced Space: Re-signify City” devices inclusive community tools and creative methods to reckon with unresolved historical wounds and controversial past. It also investigates solutions that circumvent the physical problems of the site by expanding the physical spaces with the support of virtual worlds, as such tools enable to address heritage sites and territories on the scale of the city and the landscape.

By using creative methods that lead to a change in perspective as well as hybrid technologies that ‘augment’ the urban landscape with unvoiced narratives, the city cracks open and can be re-read in its layered controversial past.
What can we learn by looking at the city as a Voiced Space?

“Voiced Space: Re-signify City” aims at awakening the sensory apprehension of urban landscapes through the lenses of global, interconnected histories, reckoning with cityscape’s past and present and its unvoiced, stratified traces. This includes recontextualizing and re-reading the cityscape, exploring alternative systems capable of including other narratives beyond the dominant ones.

Engaging experts, activists, artists, and creative professionals “Voiced Space: Re- signify City” brings creativity into controversial situations. Next to integrating design research methods into the processing of heritage and territories, it investigates digital co-creative tools, bolstering innovative ideas on (the future of) heritage sites and memory-making in the Digital Age.

 

 

 

Signing up 

Please send an email to office@hybridspacelab.net with a short motivation paper describing your relation to the theme of “Voiced Space: Re-signify City” (max. 600 words)

Register before June 22nd 2021

 

Workshop Organizers 

Prof. Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Prof. Frans Vogelaar
Hybrid Space Lab

 

More information & Contact

For more info, click here or send an email to office@hybridspacelab.net 

 

Image by Hybrid Space Lab, © Hybrid Space Lab