top of page
Tango: a spatial forensic
Materials: Text, photography and pen on cartridge sketching paper
“We become inseparable, entangled.
we are enveloped in escaped sensuality”
a poem on tango, The Connection (Braverman, 2010)
“It is a drug. After I start, I blow up all my fucking life!”
(Quote on tango from a Milonguero in Buenos Aires)
Tango: a spatial forensic is a thesis including a text and a series of drawings exploring how the spaces of tango envelop and bound bodily entanglements through codes and rituals. It takes us into the pseudo-public realms in which language, power and hierarchy are re-configured and re-articulated through dance.
Tango is a dance built on ritual, whether you are entering a club hall or just a floor delineated with unfurled cardboard boxes taped to the ground in an Argentine park. Born in the brothels of La Boca, and brought to the tea dances of the upper classes, tango, since its inception in the 1800s, was a practice synonymous with the illicit. Today the dance and its spaces serve as ‘contact-zones’ ‘where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’ (Pratt, 1991, p34).
Based in Buenos Aires the research involved a dialogical process conducting interviews, readings of poetry, history and theory, performance, and drawing maps of movement networks and spatial consciousnesses. Understanding tango through the lens of architectural, feminist and social theory, this thesis establishes a spatial forensic of the dance and its practice at different scales overtime: the city, the streetscape, the building, the hall, the dance floor, the couple and the sensorial body.
“We become inseparable, entangled.
we are enveloped in escaped sensuality”
a poem on tango, The Connection (Braverman, 2010)
“It is a drug. After I start, I blow up all my fucking life!”
(Quote on tango from a Milonguero in Buenos Aires)
Tango: a spatial forensic is a thesis including a text and a series of drawings exploring how the spaces of tango envelop and bound bodily entanglements through codes and rituals. It takes us into the pseudo-public realms in which language, power and hierarchy are re-configured and re-articulated through dance.
Tango is a dance built on ritual, whether you are entering a club hall or just a floor delineated with unfurled cardboard boxes taped to the ground in an Argentine park. Born in the brothels of La Boca, and brought to the tea dances of the upper classes, tango, since its inception in the 1800s, was a practice synonymous with the illicit. Today the dance and its spaces serve as ‘contact-zones’ ‘where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’ (Pratt, 1991, p34).
Based in Buenos Aires the research involved a dialogical process conducting interviews, readings of poetry, history and theory, performance, and drawing maps of movement networks and spatial consciousnesses. Understanding tango through the lens of architectural, feminist and social theory, this thesis establishes a spatial forensic of the dance and its practice at different scales overtime: the city, the streetscape, the building, the hall, the dance floor, the couple and the sensorial body.
Replenishing the Aquifer
Material: Text, chalk, collage, hand drawing, modelling, installation, poetry
The aquifer is under strain. With increasing development and housing targets in and around the South Downs, the aquifer is under pressure of over-abstraction. With an eroding coastline and climate migration on the horizon, the South Downs must conceive of a new system of water infrastructure to protect and replenish its existing processes.
Underfunding and neglect of infrastructure is prevalent in the UK and beyond. How can we leverage the poetics of water, geology and movement to reimagine water infrastructure in the UK as social spaces, and how might we integrate the mechanisms of water infrastructure into our settlements of daily life?
Infrastructure as social not subliminal
Throughout history, civilisations have worked with our environment to move and store water in times of excess and deficit. These water infrastructures took the form of the Subak in Indonesia and the Stepwells in India whose purposes serve not only function but spiritual and social.
Can we reposition water infrastructure to be not subliminal, but central to our social spaces and public consciousness?
Can we learn from artists like Mary Miss how to engage the public in decoding our surrounding environment? Can we design a water infrastructure that is contextual to a site’s history and ecology and bring the public more intimately in contact with the water and the processes of chalk geology?
What is Infrastructure?
What is the distinction between the infrastructure that is seen and used by people directly/explicitly vs the infrastructure which works as subliminal systems? What does it mean to be seen/unseen? What is the significance of form if it isn’t seen by many people? Or does it feature explicitly in the views and experiences of the landscape? Do people have faith/trust in infrastructure that looks/appears a certain way? Or perhaps with AI we are more accepting of functioning systems which are not visually/physically legible/explicit to us?
What would a subtle infrastructure be? What would a social and contextual infrastructure be?
The aquifer is under strain. With increasing development and housing targets in and around the South Downs, the aquifer is under pressure of over-abstraction. With an eroding coastline and climate migration on the horizon, the South Downs must conceive of a new system of water infrastructure to protect and replenish its existing processes.
Underfunding and neglect of infrastructure is prevalent in the UK and beyond. How can we leverage the poetics of water, geology and movement to reimagine water infrastructure in the UK as social spaces, and how might we integrate the mechanisms of water infrastructure into our settlements of daily life?
Infrastructure as social not subliminal
Throughout history, civilisations have worked with our environment to move and store water in times of excess and deficit. These water infrastructures took the form of the Subak in Indonesia and the Stepwells in India whose purposes serve not only function but spiritual and social.
Can we reposition water infrastructure to be not subliminal, but central to our social spaces and public consciousness?
Can we learn from artists like Mary Miss how to engage the public in decoding our surrounding environment? Can we design a water infrastructure that is contextual to a site’s history and ecology and bring the public more intimately in contact with the water and the processes of chalk geology?
What is Infrastructure?
What is the distinction between the infrastructure that is seen and used by people directly/explicitly vs the infrastructure which works as subliminal systems? What does it mean to be seen/unseen? What is the significance of form if it isn’t seen by many people? Or does it feature explicitly in the views and experiences of the landscape? Do people have faith/trust in infrastructure that looks/appears a certain way? Or perhaps with AI we are more accepting of functioning systems which are not visually/physically legible/explicit to us?
What would a subtle infrastructure be? What would a social and contextual infrastructure be?
Intimacy + Power
Intimacy + Power is a series of paintings and drawings which juxtapose flowing lines and vibrant colours of people with ‘technical’ drawings and ‘maps’. Both are rendered into a state of semi-abstraction open to hold new meanings whilst grounded in their muse. The series expresses subjective and spontaneous emotional experience, rather than physical reality rooted in the practices of the Expressionists, whilst building on perspectival and spatial techniques of Cubism and architectural drawing conventions.
The series is about relation and position. The subjects’ relation to one another, and the artist’s relation to the subject. The work juxtaposes the bodies of strangers, friends, and the artist. From a polite encounter to her own distorted form, from an intimate indiscretion to a controlled bodily intrusion.
These paintings are adapted overtime through a practice of palimpsest, where one muse, context and composition is overlaid with another, whose seams untouched break sight and reveal the incongruity and delight of opposing styles. Where bold strokes and thick paint of one image is overlaid with fine lines and short strokes of the next. Where rectilinear black blocks serve to undercut the soft curves of the flesh.
The exhibition Vernissage, for the series, Intimacy + Power, is about relation, observation and enquiry. Similar the ‘private viewing’, the work stands on the threshold of intimate intrusion and fleeting observation. Through a complex layering of flesh and line, the subject undergoes an ‘enquiry.’
Vernissage invites rather than prescribes. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ ideas of the Death of the Author, the audience-participators were invited to write their own titles and captions to the works that spoke to them, through an imperfect translation of emotion and meaning. Both the artist’s and the audience-participators’ captions are hand-written so there is no ‘official’ title, the lack of hierarchy in medium reflecting the lack of hierarchy in significance.
The series is about relation and position. The subjects’ relation to one another, and the artist’s relation to the subject. The work juxtaposes the bodies of strangers, friends, and the artist. From a polite encounter to her own distorted form, from an intimate indiscretion to a controlled bodily intrusion.
These paintings are adapted overtime through a practice of palimpsest, where one muse, context and composition is overlaid with another, whose seams untouched break sight and reveal the incongruity and delight of opposing styles. Where bold strokes and thick paint of one image is overlaid with fine lines and short strokes of the next. Where rectilinear black blocks serve to undercut the soft curves of the flesh.
The exhibition Vernissage, for the series, Intimacy + Power, is about relation, observation and enquiry. Similar the ‘private viewing’, the work stands on the threshold of intimate intrusion and fleeting observation. Through a complex layering of flesh and line, the subject undergoes an ‘enquiry.’
Vernissage invites rather than prescribes. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ ideas of the Death of the Author, the audience-participators were invited to write their own titles and captions to the works that spoke to them, through an imperfect translation of emotion and meaning. Both the artist’s and the audience-participators’ captions are hand-written so there is no ‘official’ title, the lack of hierarchy in medium reflecting the lack of hierarchy in significance.
The Chronic City: light touch trust and retrofit healing
Material: Text, animation, collage, hand drawing
The Chronic City is a project interested in the sensorial and bodily aspects of spatial experience, with a focus on rituals of healing and continual recovery to equilibrium in the daily life of people living with chronic pain.
10 to 14% of the adult population in the UK has chronic pain classed as moderate to severely disabling and among those aged 75 and above, 62% live with chronic pain. With computer working, back pain is rising in the young. With increased ageing populations, public spaces are edging into hostile territories, and with Long Covid causing correlating symptoms of fatigue, chronic access to public life is vital.
The Chronic City explores the concept of continual rehabilitation (and maintenance) in relation to the body and the city. In a continual state of recovery, the chronic subject introduces routines and mechanisms for daily relief to maintain a version of equilibrium. This project outlines new territories for chronic access whilst understanding “the chronic” as a lens through which better healing design practice might be created for all. The main “rehabilitation goals” are considered to include: 1. social participation, 2. health, 3. maximising quality of life and 4. functionality. The Chronic City identifies sites along a route, leverage points in pain-inducing or exacerbating contexts where we might intervene with retrofit healing: “Therapeutic Interventions.”
After creating a survey and conducting interviews with people with a range of chronic conditions, it was found that the majority had correlating experiences and needs. In framing “correlating needs” and not “distinct conditions” in silos, the project is interested in defining a porosity in the boundaries between conditions, and through this a solidarity an power in numbers. Each human has its own condition and constellation of needs in relation to the urban environment.
The Chronic City is explored through hand drawings, 3D modelling, painting, video animation and poetics, with a design framework for retrofit healing in the city, translating experiences into policy aims and a proposal to situate and envision this renewed care in provisioning. The proposal and research is collected into a video: the Chronic City.
The Chronic City is a project interested in the sensorial and bodily aspects of spatial experience, with a focus on rituals of healing and continual recovery to equilibrium in the daily life of people living with chronic pain.
10 to 14% of the adult population in the UK has chronic pain classed as moderate to severely disabling and among those aged 75 and above, 62% live with chronic pain. With computer working, back pain is rising in the young. With increased ageing populations, public spaces are edging into hostile territories, and with Long Covid causing correlating symptoms of fatigue, chronic access to public life is vital.
The Chronic City explores the concept of continual rehabilitation (and maintenance) in relation to the body and the city. In a continual state of recovery, the chronic subject introduces routines and mechanisms for daily relief to maintain a version of equilibrium. This project outlines new territories for chronic access whilst understanding “the chronic” as a lens through which better healing design practice might be created for all. The main “rehabilitation goals” are considered to include: 1. social participation, 2. health, 3. maximising quality of life and 4. functionality. The Chronic City identifies sites along a route, leverage points in pain-inducing or exacerbating contexts where we might intervene with retrofit healing: “Therapeutic Interventions.”
After creating a survey and conducting interviews with people with a range of chronic conditions, it was found that the majority had correlating experiences and needs. In framing “correlating needs” and not “distinct conditions” in silos, the project is interested in defining a porosity in the boundaries between conditions, and through this a solidarity an power in numbers. Each human has its own condition and constellation of needs in relation to the urban environment.
The Chronic City is explored through hand drawings, 3D modelling, painting, video animation and poetics, with a design framework for retrofit healing in the city, translating experiences into policy aims and a proposal to situate and envision this renewed care in provisioning. The proposal and research is collected into a video: the Chronic City.
I'm an image title
Describe your image here.
I'm an image title
Describe your image here.
I'm an image title
Describe your image here.
I'm an image title
Describe your image here.
I'm an image title
Describe your image here.
I'm an image title
Describe your image here.
I'm an image title
Describe your image here.
I'm an image title
Describe your image here.
I'm an image title
Describe your image here.
bottom of page