Elke Krasny und Cynthia Schwertsik, Talks on a Construction Site, 2000 © Cynthia Schwertsik
Around the turn of the millennium, practicing architects and architectural researchers introduced the term urban curating arguing for different ways of approaching dynamic master-planning in the digital realm, for new forms of connectedness when working with urban expertise and constituencies in planning and for studying overlooked dimensions of self-made architecture driving urban transformation. While the term is no longer used in this sense, there are today a number of critical urban practices, in particular feminist , eco feminist, decolonial feminist, and queer feminist, approaches to urban care and repair, that employ the notion of urban curating. This lecture presents methodological, ethical, and political dimensions of writing historiographies of praxis and raises awareness for the complexities, conflicts, contradictions as well as inspirations and potentials that present themselves when working with archives of the present. The master’s tools (Audre Lorde), critical fabulation (Saidiya Hartman) and the not-yet (Maria Hlavajova and Jeanne van Heeswijk) are discussed as relevant to establish a critical archive of praxis and approach the relations between past, present, and future otherwise.
Elke Krasny, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Author of Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19, Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care. Krasny is currently working on her forthcoming book Urban Curating. Care, Repair, Refuse, Resist.
further information:
elkekrasny.at