_thinkMake Week_04 (Spatial Practices: Thinking and Making) - Feminism in Architecture [Oct 13]

Today is the first day of my lectures about Spatial Design class so I’m being excited and nervous at the same time. It’s also already week 4 of the course but I wasn’t able to arrive on time because of my late visa. So I brainstormed about this reading and drew a visual map based on what I understood.

It was about the overall feminist views, approaches, and representation of architecture and how it was being oppressed at the start and became to slowly evolved and dominated through different timelines and how feminist practitioners used critical spatial practices in feminist ways based on five particular qualities such as collectivity, subjectivity, alterity, performativity, and materiality.

At the beginning of the lecture, we watched the presentation of this reading by two of our classmates, Linnea and Abdul, and after that, we had to submit 7 words that resonated from the texts, among those words I chose "Spatial Oppression", "Liberation Movement" and "Emerging/Diverging". These three words are transformed into "To contain", "To liberate" and "To emerge/diverge". 

Oren divided two groups and each group had to perform an activity based on our chosen verbs by using tools in our classroom. Me, Mahya, and Linnea decided to demonstrate it by using the boards, chairs, and curtains, at first Linnea was surrounded and contained by the blackboards and tables, at first she was tolerated but she raised her voice from the back by standing on the chair and chose to fight over the boards while we were shouting under her. Then she was liberated after we moved the tables into corners of the room to emerge/diverge from the cover spot. Then we ran into the curtains to control by closing and reopening them making the room refreshed.

In the evening, we were told to produce a piece of artifact which could be anything to the classroom space by using the verbs from above with any materials. I made a form of origami paper for installation, where a crystalline material or metal can be placed in the centre surrounded by triangle mirror walls diagonal to each side forming a path to enter and exist. I made the lighting coming from the outside come inside the space reflecting through the mirror with directions inside out while the main subject in the centre focused.

 

13.10.2023