Radical Cities

About

How can we share knowledge and thoughts to create positive visions of sustainable action and alternative ways of living? What is our responsibility to address economic and social concerns?

In response to the UK housing crisis, guest speakers, including Torange Khonsari, discuss the role of art, activism and architecture in politicising questioning, and creating movements of resistance to this challenging urban context.

This event is part of the London Festival of Architecture 2015.

Biographies

Alberto Duman

Alberto Duman is an artist, lecturer and independent researcher whose core interests are located in the cultural production of urban space and the agency of art within the immaterial economy of this production. Duman contributed to the publication Art of Dissent co-edited by Hilary Powell and Isaac Marrero-Guillamon, and led the event Regeneration Games at the FreeWord Centre in London. Between 2012 and 2014 he published papers and articles in amongst others: The Wick Newspaper, The Occupied Times and Architectural Review. He works with the DIG Collective, who took part in REAL ESTATES at PEER gallery in London. Most recently Duman runs the BA Level 3 Fine Art module Art Practice: Collaboration, Exhibition, Community at Middlesex University.

Torange Khonsari 

Torange Khonsari obtained her professional Diploma at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London in 1998. In 2004 she co-founded the art and architecture practice public works, an interdisciplinary practice working in the threshold of participatory and performative art, architecture and related fields of anthropology always within the public realm of the city. Their projects are socially and politically motivated and directly impact public space, working with local organisations, communities and stakeholders. Khonsari is currently a director of public works, teaches art/architecture crossover at London Metropolitan University (The Cass) and the studio ‘Architecture and Activism’ at Royal College of Art in London. Torange is also the chair of the self-organised community garden (abbey Gardens) she helped set up seven years ago.

Jane Rendell

Jane Rendell is an academic and writer whose work crosses architecture, art, feminism, history and psychoanalysis. She has developed concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ (2002/6) and ‘site-writing’ (2007/10) through such authored books as Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002) and co-edited collections like Pattern (2007), Critical Architecture (2007), Spatial Imagination (2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000), Gender, Space, Architecture (1999) and Strangely Familiar (1995). Recent texts have been commissioned by artists such as Jasmina Cibic, Apollonia Susteric and transparadiso, and institutions like FRAC Centre, Orléans, and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. She is currently completing a new book concerning transitional spaces in architecture and psychoanalysis. She is Professor of Architecture and Art at the Bartlett, UCL.