Deliberate Cities

Deliberate Cities is a research project that meets, explores, embodies, senses, notices, organises, moves and responds to our spaces. Launch is delayed but watch this space.....

Background

Deliberate Cities is a joint collaboration between Andrea Arnold and Sarah Christie (www.sarahchristie.net) and builds on the correspondences between our two practices.

Andrea’s practice explores how we occupy space as embodied selves, particularly through movement and touch, calling on the everyday capabilities of our bodies and bringing them into awareness. Recent work on this theme includes Learning to Walk which is discussed here: https://www.andreaarnold.co.uk/learning-to-walk

Sarah’s practice explores traces and expressions of human activity and embodiment, forms of contact, touch and movement, often inviting participation and active public engagement. Recent projects include:

Traces of Touch: http://www.sarahchristie.net/touch-skin-movement-expression/

Edge spaces: http://www.sarahchristie.net/new-page/

Library: www.sarahchristie.net/library/

Reading bodies: http://www.sarahchristie.net/reading-bodies/

The Loss of Forgetting

Our first project is ‘The Loss of Forgetting’ which is an enquiry into city spaces as an organising principle. Spaces that are ostensibly created specifically for humans (and no other organism) but in fact are spaces that organise us to suit themselves. Our aims are:

to bring into awareness the effect of this experience within our bodies and engage attention to aspects of the experience we normally exclude from awareness; and
to reclaim the spaces as sites for investigation and learn more about our embodied selves and our capabilities and capacities in the process.

Methodology

The purpose of this methodology is to: (a) research the city as a space for organising bodies; and (b) use the body as a tool for our investigation.

As an investigation of the city it takes place outside and requires an engagement with the space using all the senses, and, importantly, time. Our aim is to extend this investigation into multiple spaces to enable the questioning through contrastive analysis.

A download of our methodology will be made available shortly.

If you download and apply the methodology we would be very interested to hear the results of your findings.

(Findings you provide will be kept anonymous except with your permission when it will be suitably credited. Any contact information you provide will only be used to contact you and will be deleted at your request.)

Findings

We will be reporting on our findings as we gather these, refining our methodology to take them into account. Reporting will take place on our website (deliberatecities.com) which is currently being built. Watch this space…

Guided participation

We will be running guided versions of this methodology during 2020. If you would like to know more please register for interest by emailing rgb20twenty@gmail.com