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WHAT HAPPENS TO ME IN SOME ARCHITECTURES. BENJAMIN KRUSLING+CLAUDIA PAGÈS+KASHIF SHARMA-PATEL+RACHEL LEVITSKY+PALOMA CHEN

03.03.22.

what happens to me in some architectures explores questions of spatiality, circulation and visibility in public and private spaces. The five contributions depart from critical and personal experiences with the grammars that articulate urban areas and the conditions of living within them. / BENJAMIN KRUSLING maps up and down movements: of air, snow and heat, a meaning that settles over something, sunlight that falls, a sun that bleeds golden time. As part of this flow, value comes to life in a contingent way. Also entangled, dreams surf this specific circulation and instead enlarge and expand, a movement parallel to that of other overarching structures like reason, meaning-making and oppression, becoming concrete and personal. / CLAUDIA PAGÈS text and drawings focus on space, movement and temporality thinking about spirals and gerund tenses as they take form in the sea, the port and Montjuic mountain of Barcelona. Pagès critically engages with strategies of accumulation, non-sequential duration, recurrence and maintenance to explore their generative capacities and limits. / KASHIF SHARMA-PATEL’s poem is accompanied by analogue photos of Croydon. The pictures of this brutalist London suburb combine scaffolding, cranes and ornamented interiors with plants and lion fountain mouths. Both pictures and poem turn to the rhythms of politics, architecture, desire, heritage and a dys-identified psycho-geography to create a portrait of the mutating and violent ecology of social and urban life. / RACHEL LEVITSKY reflects on the suffering and happiness implied in romantic love’s acute tendency to clinging and grasping. She intertwines her own experiences with a reading of belief systems that arise within capitalist excess and misery, and also in relation to Thay’s (Thich Nhat Hanh) lesson on Buddhist manas. The text is part of a larger book in which Levitsky identifies personhood through encounter rather than biography, and in doing so it moves from one lover to a different memory to another place: bridges that cut through spaces and feelings that move through time all contribute to elaborate an idea of transport and motion that goes beyond the physical./ PALOMA CHEN takes Chinese restaurants and shops as spaces for assertion and resistance, complicating ideas around locality, possession and belonging. Chen also works with the generative possibilities of narrative, semantic and political accumulation in these spaces: the sum of texts in different languages, the collection of dishes in a menu, the store of objects at the shop, the intensification of minor gestures of violence…This relation between the apparently small and it’s sustained sum and durability calls for new political strategies in Chen’s work.

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