NOTES TOWARDS
Notes Towards the Construction of a Typology of Protest.
Publication: Pending
Abstract:
In a global context characterised by a looming climatic breakdown that is already having calamitous repercussions at both the local and planetary scales, this paper explores how the practice of architecture can contribute to enacting more effective forms of political action. More precisely, we examine the formal, spatial, material, and performative implications of a sample of protest events; in other words, we unpack the act of individual and collective resistance from what is fundamentally an architectural perspective. Drawing from architecture’s arsenal of concepts, instruments, and methods, our project seeks to construct affective narratives that simultaneously interrogate and represent a diverse range of public demonstrations. Those demonstrations include protests occurring inside and outside the space of the city — a condition that we examine aided by the writing of American philosopher and activist, Judith Butler. The result is an analytical instrument, with which amplify our understanding of the multi-scalar and multi-farious entanglement of complexities that is embedded in the fundamental human right that is collective resistance. No less significant, our project also opens a space to elaborate a protest typology; in which the formal, spatial, material, and performative patterns that emerge and repeat in these kinds of public events can be synthesised and organised to inform new forms of public assembly. With this, our project expands and consolidates architecture’s position as a political tool, with which we can contribute to influencing the citizens that belong to the multi-species assemblage of discontent that relentlessly erupts in the public spaces of the contemporary world.
