Content
In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie writes, “We are all migrants from a country called the past” (Rushdie, 1992). Rushdie suggests that the movement and transitions we experience are not only spatial but also temporal. The summer school aims to explore the fluidic nature of belonging and identity, which are central concepts in placemaking. The summer school invites the participants to consider architecture a dynamic process shaped by movement and transitions across human and non-human actors instead of static constructs. Through this lens, we aim to highlight movement as a source and a method in architecture research. Borrowing the conceptual framework from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming, we look at the contingent relationship between migration, cultural identity and placemaking. We invite the participants to think about positionality and situated knowledges in architecture research, exploring how their subjectivities, shaped by migrations across socio-cultural landscapes, influence and inform their research methods. Furthermore, the summer school looks at the physical movement of materials through urban and rural environments, examining material movement as a catalyst that shapes urban commons, and landscapes. We also aim to explore the historical and contemporary movement of architecture commodities, examining how trade routes, production processes, and consumption patterns impact landscapes across both local and geographic scales.
The summer school invites 20 PhD and master’s degree students working in art, design, architecture, and similar creative and intellectual fields to initiate a conversation towards the privileging movement as a method in architecture research. We envision a non-hierarchical peer-to-peer working environment where participants bring their methodological strengths like writing, drawing, photography, or performative practices and advance their research and practice by looking through the lens of movement and transitions.