Tao DuFour

MA HCT & PhD Debates: History in Translation. Marina Lathouri and Guest Speakers

Thursday 30 January | 4:00pm | 32 Bedford Square (First Floor Back)

This lecture will address the Debates’ theme of history ‘in-translation’ in terms of an inquiry into three interrelated phenomena: empathy, corporeity, and spatiality. We will draw primarily on contemporary scholarship on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein on empathy (Einfühlung), and Jan Patočka and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on embodiment, in dialogue with the architectural theory of the late Dalibor Vesely. Beginning with this initial sketch of the philosophical problems, we consider concretely the question of the sense perceptual and empathic basis of the experience of the historical horizon of an ‘Other’s’ world, in terms of the expressive and communicative structures of corporeity and spatiality. The concrete, exemplary event that will guide our inquiry is a ritual practice of an Afro-Brazilian religion—called a Candomblé caboclo reunião of Tupikinim—situated in the periphery of the city of Salvador in the Brazilian Northeast. Our access to the ritual will be primarily through ethnographic descriptions of its spatiality, and thus implicated in our considerations is the question of the status of ethnography as a method and descriptive practice. Following the critiques of philosopher Valentin Mudimbe, we will foreground the ethical implications of the hermeneutic sense of empathy (Einfühlung) for ethnography. Mudimbe’s empathic thesis derived from hermeneutics, I propose, bears a certain affinity with anthropologist

Marilyn Strathern’s methodological grounding of ethnography in the concrete conditions of fieldwork and its ‘effects’. We will thus explore the question of the status of spatiality for ethnography in Strathern in relation to Mudimbe’s critique of ethnography’s historicity. The problems raised through a consideration of the above phenomenological and anthropological relations will guide us in investigating the tensions in the understandings of the relationship between historicity and spatiality for the shared, embodied experience of the ritual as exemplary, and its more general implications.

Image: Caboclo figurine on the ritual table. Salvador 2010. Photography by Tao DuFour

Readings:

Marilyn Strathern, “The Ethnographic Effect I”, in Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (London: The Athlone Press, 1999), pp.1-26.

Klaus Held, “Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Life-World”, in The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, edited by DonnWelton (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp.32-62.

Dermot Moran, “Edith Stein’s Encounter with Edmund Husserl and Her Phenomenology of the Person”, in Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood: Essays on Edith Stein’s Phenomenological Investigations, edited by Elisa Magrì and Dermot Moran (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017), pp.31-47.

Tao DuFour, “Toward a Somatology of Landscape: Anthropological Multinaturalism and the ‘Natural’ World”, in Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture, edited by Ellan Braae and Henriette Steiner (London: Routledge, 2019), pp.156-170.

Valentin Mudimbe, “The Patience of Philosophy”, in The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp.135-186.

Biography: Tao DuFour is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. His work explores the overlaps between architecture, anthropology, and philosophy, building on his research on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. His current research is concerned with the question of architecture’s embeddedness in environmental histories. He holds a PhD and MPhil in the history and philosophy of architecture from the University of Cambridge, and a BArch from The Cooper Union. He is the author of Husserl and Spatiality: Toward a Phenomenological Ethnography of Space (Routledge, forthcoming 2020).

Penelope Haralambidou

MA HCT & PhD Debates: History in Translation. Marina Lathouri and Guest Speakers

Thursday 13 February | 4:00pm | 32 Bedford Square (First Floor Back)

The paper will present my practice/drawing-led research, which focuses on two works by French late medieval author Christine de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405; and The Book of the Body Politic, c.1404-07.
Conflating the act of writing a book – a thesis against institutional misogyny – with the construction of an imaginary city, the first work, The Book of the City of Ladies, has been seen as a proto-feminist manifesto. Although widely studied in terms of its literary significance, I focus on the under-researched architectural and urban allegory depicted in the text, which imagines a Utopia inhabited solely by women and constructed for them by a woman (de Pizan herself), as well as its accompanying illuminations (miniature illustrations) displaying three different stages of the foundation and physical construction of the city. Inspired by Aristotle’s Politics and revisiting the ancient Greek metaphor, by which a state or society and its institutions are conceived of as a biological human body, in the second work, The Book of the Body Politic, de Pizan offers her version of a medieval political theory, which I attempt to connect with her allegorical city.

Image: Photograph by Andy Keate

Readings:

Penelope Haralambidou (2016). ‘With-drawing Room on Vellum: The Persistent Vanishing of the Architectural Drawing Surface’. In Allen, L., Pearson L. (Eds.). Drawing Futures: Speculations for Contemporary Art and Architecture (pp.82–89). London UCL Press

Sandra L. Hindman. ‘With Ink and Mortar. Christine de Pizan’s Cite des Dames’. In: Feminist Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 457-483

Earl Jeffrey Richards. ‘Where are the men in Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies. Architectural and Allegorical Structures in Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cite des Dames.

Biography: Penelope Haralambidou is Associate Professor and Director of Communications at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She coordinates MArch PG24, where she promotes a highly innovative research-based teaching methodology that uses digital film and immersive environments to re-think architectural design through time. Her research employs architectural drawing, model-making and digital film as investigatory tools to analyse ideas and work, not only in architecture, but also visual representation, the politics of vision, art and cinema. Her work has been exhibited internationally, she is the author of the monograph Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire (London: Routledge, 2013), and she has contributed writing on themes, such as architectural representation, allegory, figural theory, stereoscopy and film to a wide range of publications. Her solo show, ‘City of Ladies’, presenting her practice-led research of Christine de Pizan’s proto- feminist text The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405, was hosted by DomoBaal gallery in January–February 2020.

Eray Cayli

MA HCT & PhD Debates: History in Translation. Marina Lathouri and Guest Speakers

Thursday 23 January | 4:00pm | 32 Bedford Square (First Floor Back)

This seminar will explore aesthetics as central to the various issues debated today under the rubric of the Anthropocene. It will do so especially by attending to the ways in which the environment is aestheticised as part of political projects and by asking how these aestheticisations in turn engender, encourage and legitimise particular environmental interventions. In terms of its critical analytical objectives, the seminar aims to complicate flattening notions of humanity and universality that continue to characterise mainstream approaches to the Anthropocene in architecture and related disciplines.

Image: View of a Coal Seam on the Island of Labuan (engraved by L.C. Heath & lithographed by C.W. Giles, 1847)

Readings:

Dilip da Cunha, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018)

Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002)

Biography: Eray Cayli, PhD (University College London, 2015), studies the aesthetics and geographies of political violence in Turkey anthropologically. His current research concerns with how these legacies shape and are shaped by contemporary discourses and practices around disaster and resilience. Eray is Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow (2018-21) at London School of Economics and Political Science where he also teaches the postgraduate course ‘Imaging Violence, Imagining Europe’. He is currently completing a monograph tentatively titled Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of ‘Confronting the Past’ in Turkey, co-editing the volume Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement, Catastrophe, and guest-editing a special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture themed ‘Field as Archive / Archive as Field’. Eray is a co-founder of Amed Urban Workshop, an independent academy for critical spatial research based in the city of Amed (officially known as Diyarbakır) in Turkey’s Kurdistan, where he also undertook a residency at the artist-run space Loading in summer 2019.

Dorette Panagiotopoulou

Supervisors: Mark Cousins, Doreen Bernath

The thesis explores the space between voice, speech and writing though a study on the oracle of Delphi, an oral culture that is then transcribed and codified into written text. The manifold life of sign and sound (of language itself) as well as that of the author and the receiver, are attached by the material they share: writing, a currency always in the throws of exchange. An ideology of writing and receiving, the relationship between sound, silence, and voice, is like all relations, about power. Does the voice have to submit to the written word? Was writing more like an act of re-writing or what we may call editing in the early period of the adoption of writing to speech, rather than a whole new way of representing language? The relationship of writer and receiver, sound and silence is one of domination but also – sometimes – one of commonality. 

Within the study of oracular statements and inscriptions at the temple of Delphi, I am developing a central question which concerns the tension between the narratives which describe it as an utterance by the Pythia and the oracle’s appearance, circulation, and dissemination in textual form – the tension here being between the spoken and the written word. The question of the oracle’s dissemination is a crucial one, as it presents a form of language or rather a cultural phenomenon that combines both literacy and orality. Even the Pythia’s language itself, emerges as neither deceptive nor crystalline, falling thus somewhere between the written and the illusory. There is one main concept that seems to link the two studies, specifically, inscription. The analysis of the letter “E” in Plutarch’s dialogue “On the E at Delphi”, leads to an understanding of inscription as something that acts as a lure or an invitation to investigate. The letter “E” takes the form of a pure symbol of judgment that evokes both the acts of interpretation and intuition in relation to truth. The Delphic inscription, mediated by Plutarch, has become a classic instance of the problem of interpretation. Not unlike oracular formulations that neither conceal nor reveal but indicate, inscription appears as both formal and hermeneutic. It entails the ability to say and to represent at the same time, while revealing the division or even blurring the lines that separate sign, form, and word. The very thing that is both seen and read is muted in the vision, and concealed in the reading. Thus, inscription bears a “not yet to say” and a “no longer to represent” that leads to the search for that force that produces a full meaning – one beyond the grasp of the linguistic – that utters the unspeakable through the “space” of emptiness and silence. 

Image: Juxtaposition of film still and the Temple of Apollo (Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life, RA)

Biography: Dorette Panagiotopoulou has obtained a Masters degree in Cultural and Intellectual History at the Warburg Institute after having completed her Undergraduate Studies at the AA, from which she graduated in 2013 from Diploma unit 14. She is currently undertaking a PhD that examines the subject of the Delphic Oracle, under the supervision of Mark Cousins and Doreen Bernath, while teaching in the AA History and Theory Studies courses as a seminar tutor. She has previously worked at Hopkins Architects in London, as well as in the Re-Activate Athens project – a research and design initiative led by Urban-Think Tank studio based at ETH in Zürich in collaboration with the Onassis Foundation in Athens. She has also briefly worked on the report “Rafah: Black Friday” at Forensic Architecture based at Goldsmiths University. She is currently collaborating with a of group professors and architects from the Polytechnic School of Athens (NTUA) on a large project aimed to be realized in 2021 in Eleusis.

Gili Merin

Supervisors: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria Giudici

The thesis explores the ritual of sacred travel to the city of Jerusalem. It studies pilgrimage as a project in which the pilgrim, as a subject who is led by spiritual orientation, contributes to the appropriation of the cities and landscapes that he or she is perpetually crossing. While pilgrimage is indeed acknowledged as a journey in pursuit of a religious objective, it will nevertheless be studied, in this thesis, as a powerful social and cultural vector that often destabilized the economic, civic, and political conditions of the places of worship. The thesis will expand the definition of pilgrimage to Jerusalem by including a variety of analogous ‘Jerusalems’ that proliferated around the world as pilgrimage sites in their own right. As such, it will place the ritual of travel to the City of Jerusalem as a flexible practice that is not geographically confined but could be enacted by the varied combination of text, place, memory, and visual imagination—arguing for the possibility of relief from territorial confinement, and the violence it conceals. 

The thesis will unfold both chronologically and thematically in order to explore how the mentality of pilgrims and the scenography of pilgrimage has produced particular structures, landscapes, and representations that I refer to as the Architecture of Pilgrimage. Each of the five chapters looks both into a specific era in the history of Jerusalem pilgrimage (early Christianity, the Middle Ages, the beginning of Modernity and the 20th Century), as well as a particular theme, such as the fabrication of sacred landscapes, the intelligence of analogical thinking, the importance of movement in ritual, the politics of heritage and preservation, and the formation of collective memory. While these paradigmatic ideas did not necessarily originate in Jerusalem, the city’s condition allows their examination in a state of acceleration and saturation.

Methodologically, the thesis uses photography as a tool for architectural research and design, producing a travelogue composed of photographs and text. As documentation, this project will provide primary evidence of the current condition of Jerusalem pilgrimage. As representation, it will join a lineage of past endeavours that has used the medium of photography to frame spaces as a tool of architectural design. As a series, the images will unfold along the itinerary of the thesis and form cartography of pilgrimage. As a project, it will trace, define, and speculate on a possible new route Towards Jerusalem.

Image: Stations of the Cross in the Sacred Mountain of Varese, Italy. Photo by Gili Merin, 2018

Biography: Gili Merin is an architect and photographer She is a Diploma unit master at the AA, a lecturer for History and Theory of architecture at the Royal College of Arts, and a visiting professor in Syracuse University. She was trained as an architect, editor and researcher at OMA in Rotterdam, Kuehn Malvezzi in Berlin and Efrat-Kowalsky in Tel Aviv. Gili writes and photographs regularly for the Architects’ Journal, Frame Magazine and Haaretz newspaper. Her essays and reportages have been published in a number of print and online journals, amongst them the AA Files, MITs Thresholds, The Guardian and The Architectural Review.

Enrica Mannelli

Supervisors: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria Giudici

The thesis studies the evolution of the “social factory” and the related social movements that tackled this evolution. The concept of the social factory rises from a theory developed by Mario Tronti in early 1960 who claimed that in a Fordist society “the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society”. Therefore, the history of the social factory is the evolution of an exploitative system, marked and challenged by a series of struggles led by the working class, the subject exploited. From an urban perspective, the Fordist social factory is the first moment that every single element of the city (such as factories, housing projects, and parks) and urban activity (working, dwelling, and leisure) is commodified and planned according to the main production system in order to fulfil the main goal of reproducing the labour force, i.e. making people productive. The urban history of the social factory – which this thesis sets out to trace – is the evolution of the city structure in relation to the evolution of the system. 

In the last 60 years, the working world has moved from a production system based on the factory assembly line to the contemporary “creative factory” that exploits not only intellectual labour but also the workers’ life as such; from zoning policies to a condition where we are unable to mark the spatial boundaries of the work field. As an illustration of this shift in the nature of work, Italy represents an exemplary and fast-paced case study while at the same time, Italian thinkers and practitioners of the 1960s and 1970s produced extensive theoretical and political contributions on this precise topic. Among them, the rejection of the system expressed by the Italian theories of autonomy and the Autonomia movement is the most interesting. 

Therefore, this research will analyse the structure of several Italian cities in relation to a particular shift within the evolution of the system: Turin, the factory; Bologna, the creative city; Rome, the autonomous social centre; and Milan, the cooptation of the autonomous social centre. In doing so, it questions the urban form in two ways: as an outcome of the capitalist system, reading urban planning as a means of capitalism itself; and as a contested spatiality in which the struggles of workers and citizens occur. Ultimately, this project questions the opportunity to tackle the contemporary Roman social factory through an urban policy to enable a system of social factory workshops. The latter is imagined as a critique of the Centro Sociale Occupato Autogestito (Self-managed occupied social centre; CSOA) that represent an important moment and space within the evolution of Italian theories of autonomy, and an opportunity to challenge the relentless nature of capitalism.

Image: Tano D’Amico, Girl and Guards, Rome (1977)

Biography: Enrica Mannelli is an architect. She graduated in Architecture in Rome (2008) and holds a Master of Arts in Housing and Urbanism from the Architectural Association (2017). As a firm believer in the importance of acquiring hands-on experience alongside academic study, she worked in a number of firms of different sizes, methods, and ambitions: among them, she collaborated with Cino Zucchi Architetti in Milan and Lynch Architects in London. She is currently working between Rome and London while pursuing her PhD by Design.