Curating the Urban. On Spatializing Urban Conditions

The two-year research project Curating The Urban. On Spatializing Urban Conditions by Christina Nägele, Heidi Pretterhofer, Christian Teckert together with Linda Lackner investigated the spatial impacts of a cognitive capitalism, which is characterized by immaterial labor, deregulation, and precarious identity concepts. The corresponding urban form is the project-based polis in which the constant demand for self-optimization and performance blends with the algorithmic figures of (in)dividualization.

In this context a series of urban case studies, architectural typologies, and cultural symptoms were researched in cooperation with partners Jorge Almazán (Tokyo) and Urban Subjects (Vancouver):

Dividuality of Spaces / Spaces of Dividuality, Migration of Forms / Forms of Migration, Economy of Architecture / Architecture of Economy

As laboratory for the multipart project the project space halfway was conceived, as a site for the spatialization of acute urban phenomena with methods of artistic research. The research discourse was translated into cumulative, progressive spatializations. They served as displays but also as platforms for negotiation and action, which were repeatedly reconfigured over the course of the discursive work. This curatorial method implies a participatory form of knowledge production, which builds upon a confluence of spatialized arguments by diverse actors in the fields of urbanism, art, and architecture as well as intermittent interventions by protagonists from various fields of knowledge. Hence, halfway was both a site of presentation/representation and action/production.