traversing the campus: journeys through the angularities and winding passages of the university in...
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A talk at Cass Business School, City of London University, for Motirot's Multiplicites event in April 2013 A recording of the talk can be listened to here: https://soundcloud.com/motiroti1/multiplicities-tinarichardsonTRANSCRIPT
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Traversing the Campus:Journeys through the angularities and winding passages of the university in ruins
Tina RichardsonUniversity of Leeds
The University in Ruins
Dwelling in the Ruins
Dwelling in the ruins of the University thus means giving a serious attention to the present complexity of space, undertaking an endless work of détournement of the spaces willed to us by a history whose temporality we no longer inhabit. Like the inhabitants of some Italian city, we can seek neither to rebuild the Renaissance city-state nor to destroy its remnants and install rationally planned tower-blocks; we can seek only to put its angularities and winding passages to new uses, learning from and enjoying the cognitive dissonances that enclosed piazzas and non-signifying campanile induce.
(Bill Readings 2009: 129)
Psychogeography
The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.
[the] active observation of present-day urban agglomerations
cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
[A psychogeographer is] One who explores and reports on psychogeographical phenomena.
(Situationist International)
Schizocartography
Schizocartography offers a method of cartography that questions dominant power structures and at the same time enables subjective voices to appear from underlying postmodern topography. It is the process and output of a psychogeography of particular spaces that have been co-opted by various capitalist-oriented operations, routines or procedures. It attempts to reveal the aesthetic and ideological contradictions that appear in urban space while simultaneously reclaiming the subjectivity of individuals by enabling new modes of creative expression. Schizocartography challenges anti-production, the homogenizing character of overriding forms that work towards silencing heterogeneous voices.
Reappropriated University Map
Aerial View of Campus
Pauline Mavis White – Died 1946
Traversing the Cemetery Wall
