Gender and Space Guest Professorship
The Gender and Space programme combines approaches of art and art theory with the aim of developing themes practically and theoretically and reflecting on one's own approach.
GENDER & SPACE
Embodied Practices and Feminist Theories as a Tool for Connection, Collective Liberation, Rest, and Resistance
Recently, the intellectual Central-European space has been overloaded with discussions about the workings and failings of democracy at a time when we are facing the concrete danger of far-right politics. Left-wing fourth-wave feminism takes intersectional solidarity as a central theme, yet these ideas are not invited into ongoing official discussions. So we ask: how can contemporary fourth-wave queer-feminist thought contribute to rethinking democratic concepts of society?
Feminist thought and practice still stand on the margins and must be brought to the center to disrupt existing power structures. How can artistic spatial practice, architecture, and urban design contribute to this? Let's explore core contemporary feminist texts, artistic strategies, and how the shifted paradigm of the 4th wave, with its “queer-positive, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven tactics” (Harriss-Morrow, 2021), is transforming the way we think about space and power.
By combining somatics and exploring the tools of contemporary feminism, we create a safer/braver space for student collectives and their own critical artistic or architectural practice and activism. We are interested in collective activity based on transdisciplinary artistic approaches, research, and community work. These approaches are crucial for the architectural environment as they challenge the established stereotypes about the form of architectural practice itself and the question of who can be an architect, emphasize the environmental impacts of building and demolition, and highlight feminist practices of care, repair, and adaptive reuse, spatial justice, and feminist infrastructures. In doing so, we work critically beyond the canon of art history, showing the inequalities that underpin it and that it continues to reproduce. Our research and teaching practice is deeply transdisciplinary, bridging the fields of art, architecture, urban space, and cultural criticism and theory.
From our position, we try to connect the space of Central Europe, create projects in collaboration with Bratislava, Brno, or Prague, invite local experts and look for mutual inspiration, for example, through tools of anti-fascist activism (Open Culture Initiative, SK) or interdisciplinary feminist spatial practices (Spolka Collective, SK). The way we teach is also deeply influenced by feminist practices, so we are invested in creating safer/braver spaces for students and involving the whole collective in decision-making.
We do a lot of reading of feminist theories (Lola Olufemi, Marina Vishmidt, Silvia Federici, Leslie Kern, Sara Ahmed, Tricia Hersey, etc.) and connect them to art andarchitectural practice: e.g., through the concepts of margin as a place of radical openness (bell hooks), emotional capital in architecture (Menna Agha) or queer use (Sara Ahmed)). Performative techniques and body exercises are also an important part of our classes for grounding, connecting to one's own body and feelings and our environment, or as a means of collective operating
Methodological inspirations:
- Symposionism: a polydisciplinary site-specific practice of celebrating discourse
- Co-Composition & Deep listening: our collective work will be inspired by the improvisational, co-compositional, listening abilities of musical sessions
- Radical democracy, neo-Zapatism, Rojava model, sociocracy
- Living Library: conversations based on the concept of living books: (marginalized) persons tell about their experiences as real-life experts
- Body-based / embodied spatial & artistic research
Professors at the IKA 2024-2026