Architecture, Festival & The City

DAY 1 KEYNOTE THE DANCING SPACE THE ANIMATION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE (INNER) LANDSCAPE Rosie Kay Rosie Kay Dance Company, United Kingdom

CONFERENCE EXHIBITION ARCHITECTURE, FESTIVAL & THE CITY Historically the urban festival served as an occasion for affirming shared convictions and identities in the life of the city.

Whether religious or civic in nature, these events provided tangible expressions of social, cultural, political and religious cohesion, often reaffirming a particular shared ethos within very diverse urban landscapes. In the life of any city some festivals inevitably become obsolete, some start afresh, while others transform into new expressions of communality that can be characterised using more recent concepts such as hypermodernity or supermodernity. Architecture, both temporary and permanent, has long served as a key aspect of festive space, exhibiting continuity in the flux of these representations through the parading of elaborate ceremonial floats in such cities as Venice, Florence and Rome (from the 13th through to the 17th century) as well as contemporary manifestations such as Notting Hill Carnival, Rio Carnival, or the ‘Day of the Dead’ throughout the Americas. These processional festivals have often been complemented by other forms of festival, such as annual music festivals or political rallies, which, although often fixed, also contribute to the transformation of the urban environment.

These more recent developments raise important questions about the definition and status of festival, carnival and ritual in the contemporary world, and to what extent traditional practices can serve as meaningful references. ____________________________________

Choreographer and director Rosie Kay discusses creating work for outdoor and specific spaces and the role of the artist in transforming and reclaiming public and private space. With a range of works that has seen her and her company perform in military bases behind the wire, public and private shopping spaces in city centres, a preserved steam railway and a Scottish Borders country house estate, Kay discusses the practical with the theoretical. From the complexities of permissions and licenses, the threat of security guards and drunken interventions, Kay highlights the depth of work artists undertake in accessing and claiming these spaces. Artistically, Kay examines the motivations for the artist, the power of transgressing the everyday use of a space, and the transformation of memory in those who participate in unusual space events.

Kay asks how can we undermine the assumption of space as a concrete reality, a space that contains, and see it more as a fluid place of social interaction, re-shaping the individual and city identity.

Sanja Festival in Tokyo

dangling from an empty saddle generated some emotion. In this lecture, I will use the failure of Wellington’s funeral procession as a point of departure for discussing the modern urban spectacle, balancing precariously between authenticity and ersatz. ____________________________________

Context - Architecture and the Genius of Place Eric Parry, Eric Parry Architects Photographies: Dirk Linder The collection of photographs by the photographer Dirk Lindner were commissioned to follow the written and drawn analysis of urban contexts in specific districts of New York, London, Paris and Rome. They accompany the chapter concerning public space titled Kinetics in: Context - Architecture and the Genius of Place, published by Wiley in 2015. The limitations of both space and budget meant that only a small selection could be included in the book, and this is the first opportunity to exhibit a wider range. ____________________________________

Silver Forest Patrick Lynch, Lynch Architects Film by Tapio Snelman (made in collaboration with the artist Rut Blees Luxemburg) of The Silver Forest, an art work developed in 2016 at the base of Westminster City Hall. It includes a voice over, a reading of a poem by Douglas Parks, written in response to the art work.

Drawings, photographs, and 1/1 scale material samples of the cast concrete panels. ____________________________________

Raymond Lucas Notations and drawings for producing a ‘graphic anthropology’ using examples from my current work on the Sanja festival in Tokyo (which involves temporary and portable buildings, appropriation of everyday space and processional elements. ____________________________________

Suz/O/Suz (1985) Degustacion de Titus Andronicus (2010) Afrodita y el juicio de Paris (2013)

spaces and alternative theatre spaces - a butchery, an abandoned mortuary… etc. - creating situations in which the audience is exposed to violence, nudity and sexual acts in the main public locations of the cities. They developed their own performative language – Furan Language – that emerges through collectiveness with audience working in public spaces. The performance language of la Fura creates meanings which are not contained within themselves, but are acts of expression towards the exterior, translated into the provocative, violent and sexual acts that they stage. Over the years, la Fura has worked in different performance locations, however they preserved characteristics of an outdoor spectacle, similar to working in public spaces.

Conference paper: Dundjerovic A., Martinez M., Sexual acts and performativity in Public Spaces ____________________________________

Teatro Oficina. Lina bo Bardi.

Macumba Antropofaga. Teatro Oficina Uzyna Uzona, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2017) In Macumba Antropofaga (Teatro Oficina, Sao Paulo, 2017), a 5-hour long performance, displays a clear process of how contextualization and organising of conditions invoke change in the accepted social behaviour. The dramaturgy of sexual acts is being set up from the beginning of the performance by creating a space of intimacy between audience and performers. The first part of the performance takes the audience from the space of Teatro Oficina through a procession in the streets of Sao Paulo, in the surrounding area. This procession was integrated into the everyday life of the streets with their inhabitants – both in regulated buildings and favelas. Some of the people who lived in the favela that was located under a nearby bridge joined the procession breaking the boundaries between performance and everyday life. In the creation of intimacy, the audience role was inverted, and they were made part of a spectacle, as people on the street who observed the procession of audience and actors became the spectators.

La Fura dels Baus Conference paper: Dundjerovic A., Martinez M., Sexual acts and performativity in Public Spaces ____________________________________

On Festival and Failure Mari Hvattum The Duke of Wellington’s funeral procession in November 1852 was the largest urban spectacle in nineteenth century Britain. Gathering some one and a half million people on the streets, the procession made a lavish display of troops and armour, including a massive bronze funeral car designed by Richard Redgrave and Gottfried Semper. Staged as a Roman triumph, the funeral procession aimed to transform London’s Piccadilly into Via Sacra.

For all its lavishness, however, the event was a failure. The pomp left the spectators cold; newspapers reported that only the sight of Wellington’s horse with his boots

Post-Colonial Legacies in Seville: Traces of the IberoAmerican Exhibition, 1929 Ana Souto

La Fura dels Baus (Barcelona, Spain) is a theatre company – originally an independent street theatre company based in Barcelona, brings provocative and radical acts into public spaces. Since 1979, La Fura creates radical mise-enscenes making interventions into public

The Ibero-American Exhibition (IAE), celebrated in Seville in 1929, differs from other International exhibitions in several aspects: The IAE was not international, but only Spanish and Latin American in content (even though Brazil and the US also participated with pavilions); the IAE was designed to showcase the postcolonial Spanish and Latin American

cultural context, rather than an overview of industrial and colonial representations, as it had been done in most International Exhibitions and World Fairs; and finally, most of the pavilions and urban landscapes were designed as permanent features of the city of Seville, instead of the temporary pavilions which were more popular in other international expositions.

As a result, the IAE could be interpreted as a “Third Space”, were new representations and narratives around national and postcolonial narratives were questioned and challenged. ____________________________________

We are F=!

FAB FEST

Here we are able to interact playfully with passers by, have debate and explore how the use of spectacle, humour and celebration can facilitate a visible space for other voices to be heard. To have a voice means “the right to self-determination, to participation, to consent or dissent; to live and participate, to interpret and narrate.”

(Rebecca Solnit). ____________________________________

David Scott, Krista Zvirgzda, Matas Olendra, Francois Girardin FAB FEST takes place in the centre of a great City and participants engaged with a selection of its attractions in events through the week. It also however explores ideas about the city directly, and how they might be transformed through participants’ designs for what they imagine the Cities of tomorrow to be. Also of particular value is the international nature of the festival encouraging the blending and exchange of ideas between creative young people from very different cultures. The transient urban space that was produced then became a site in which to interact with the local community, who were brought into the festival through joint projects instigated in the months building up to the event. ____________________________________

Re:connections: A Festival Of Conversations; Dialogical Arts Practice As A Method of Generating Conversations About A Place Jenny Peevers Floor map : Claire Hickey & Emily Warner Vendor trays with objects: Claire Hickey and Emily Warner Photographs by Dan Burwood, Claire Hickey, Emily Warner, Jess May Davies, Justin Wiggan Re:connections was a creative placemaking project in the Lee Bank/Park Central area of Birmingham in June and July 2017 to explore residents emotional responses to where they live through sensory arts practice. Jenny Peevers devised and produced the project and involved the following artists who brought residents together through conversations prompted by their practice: Justin Wiggan (sound); Dan Burwood (photography); Jess May Davies (Poetry) and Claire Hickey and Emily Warner (visual arts/performance) using their Make/Shift/Space pop-up structure. The project culminated with a shared picnic in Moonlit Park where artists presented and performed artworks and continued conversations with residents.

F= Research Group at Leeds Beckett University, United Kingdom We believe in the power of art and design as a platform for social change. We celebrate, debate, question, listen and make together and invite others to join us. For four years we have celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8th with a walk through the city centre, the ritualistic burning of a large symbolic object followed by performances, exhibition and conference in the City of Leeds public library.

PRESS Susannah Self PRESS is an installation consisting of a textural soundscape with abstract video images sourced from printing machines, the Abraham Lincoln chorus booklet and the massed rally. The streets of Birmingham provide a backdrop for PRESS as it explores the relationship between the utopian ideals of the Abraham Lincoln choruses in contrast to the inflammatory rhetoric of the 1934 fascist rally. Through the geographical/historical juxtaposition of the choruses being printed in the same year as the rally, the aural/visual landscape of PRESS examines how authoratative and subversive elements of human expressions collide and recede. ____________________________________

with qualities of momentarily urbanism.

Moreover, houses and scattered built moments of the settlement were dynamically integrated to the festival.

The ‘open-windows’ activity offered the pedestrians cultural spectacles that took place in the houses. The ‘open-houses’ gave the opportunity to the festival participants to spend a day within the houses. The houses became essential part of the festival. At the same time giant inflatable structures ‘invaded’ the streets claiming the space from the cars offering it to the people for public, semi-private activities. ____________________________________

The Trial of Harold Pinter Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerovic

Mind The Gap Polly Hudson Photographer: Isabella Lockett This was a work that responded to the architecture of the South Bank Centre, London. At night, glass fragments within the concrete light up from underneath, and words weave their way through the floor as if emerging from another world. Movement material answered to the site: both the art insertion within it, and the existing architecture. This perhaps then enabled witnesses, an audience made up of people who found the work by both intention and by accident, to discover a new sense of their own body, breath and physicality as well as seeing the space through fresh eyes. ____________________________________

Vacio (Festas de Ourense, Spain, 2012) Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez

In October 2006, Kolectiv Theatre participated in Joakim Fest in city of Kragujevac, Serbia with the multimedia site specific promenade The Trial of Harold Pinter. The multilingual devised performance (English and Serbian) was based on sound installation using collage of Pinter’s noble prize speech criticising American wars and imperialism , small fragments of his plays, poetry and themes from one act play Mountain Language. The location was abandoned and bombed out (by 1999 NATO’s war on Yugoslavia) factory Zastava ( Flag) which was the biggest car manufacturer in Yugoslavia. It was also one of the most important military factories. The piece explored the relation between place, performance, spectator, and different visual and sound scape embodied within the site. This was guerrilla performance that was not announced to audience, which were taken after the last show in buses blindfolded into the secure and locked down facilities. We where the first one to enter after the bombing in 1999.

More about this work can be accessed on the published article: Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerovic (2013) Freezing of Collective Memory, Performance Research, 18:6, 137145, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.908069 ____________________________________

The Urban “Glenti”

Kupu Kupu Malam

Yiorgos Hadjichristou; Alessandra Swiny

Jonathan Peter Day

Along the ever resonating repercussions and the war scars of the Buffer Zone in Kaimakli in Nicosia, sparking moments of festive urban everyday life reverberated a few times in the recent two years. The ‘Pame Kaimakli’ activities organized by residents took place in various forms of expressions rendering the neighborhood with both familiar and unprecedented urban vibes, thus scripting on the urban scape new stories and memories for its people. These ephemeral and spontaneous urban injections in the traditional core of Kaimakli- once a village and now part of the capital of Cyprus enriched it

Vacio (2012) is an interdisciplinary project in which an inflatable structure is put at the disposal of the performance arts to stage the piece Psicosis 4:48 of the British writer Sarah Kane. Plastic and body work together moulding each other through the plasticity of movement. The inflatable defines the movements of the actress and her relationship with the public, while it is deformed by the actions of the body. Vacio won the INJUVE Young Creation Award in the area of performing arts, was presented at the MNCA Reina Sofia de Madrid (2012) and won the Award from the audience at the International Independent Theatre Festival of Szczecin (Polland, 2012).

Actress: Alba Loureiro, Diana Irazabal / Space design: Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez / Soundscape: Cristina R. Sanz de Siria

Walking an unfamiliar street in a port city, so tired as to be almost hallucinating, yet unable to sleep. It is the early darkness of the tropics, the time of sunset hardly changing, season to season. The air is hot and damp, heavily scented with jasmine and excrement, the streets noisy and fluorescent, with always around a corner the almost sepulchral silence of a temple precinct or dilapidated shrine. Wandering the streets without aim, hearing, seeing, smelling. Amidst the festival chaos fly Kupu Kupu Malam – by equal parts butterflies, and courtesans.

DAY 2 KEYNOTES SCORE AND SCRIPT: REVISITING NELSON GOODMAN AT SANJA MATSURI Raymond Lucas University of Manchester, UK

In which I will underline the utility of notations and drawings for producing a ‘graphic anthropology’ using examples from my current work on the Sanja festival in Tokyo (which involves temporary and portable buildings, appropriation of everyday space and processional elements).

ON FESTIVAL AND FAILURE Mari Hvattum The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway The Duke of Wellington’s funeral procession in November 1852 was the largest urban spectacle in nineteenth century Britain. Gathering some one and a half million people on the streets, the procession made a lavish display of troops and armour, including a massive bronze funeral car designed by Richard Redgrave and Gottfried Semper. Staged as a Roman triumph, the funeral procession aimed to transform London’s Piccadilly into Via Sacra.

For all its lavishness, however, the event was a failure. The pomp left the spectators cold; newspapers reported that only the sight of Wellington’s horse with his boots dangling from an empty saddle generated some emotion. In this lecture, I will use the failure of Wellington’s funeral procession as a point of departure for discussing the modern urban spectacle, balancing precariously between authenticity and ersatz.

THE SHELL: AM Reading The Accession Day Tilts In Relation To Festival And The Elizabethan Notion of ‘Lost Sense of Sight’ Constance Lau, University of Westminster, United Kingdom Accession Day on 17 November was ‘a holidaye which passed all the popes holidayes’ and the Tilts were a fundamental aspect of the festivities.1 These jousting tournaments often described as decadent, were celebrated in the tiltyard of Whitehall Palace and their imagery was designed to build up ‘the political and theological position of Protestant England’.2 This paper concerns the roles of users and architecture in relation to history.

Issues of site include the architecture of Whitehall Palace, the tiltyard and the ephemeral locations alluded to in the jousting narratives. The Palace was the centre of royal life since 1530 and was argued to be ‘an artistic, political, and social focus’.3 A fire in 1698, subsequent sporadic rebuilding and occupancy as government offices have hampered historical reconstruction efforts.

The notion that the reading of architecture is not fixed and static is important if buildings are to contribute to history meaningfully. Hence all shifts, material or otherwise are important. Buildings cannot simply act as backdrops to events, but need to be integrated and read as part of the said occasion. The Horse Guards Parade currently occupies the site of the tiltyard, and accommodates the daily Changing the Queen’s Life Guard as well as the ceremonies of Beating the Retreat and Trooping the Colour.

The notion of ‘lost sense of sight’ in relation to Elizabethan vision refers to the ability to understand the intention and meaning of certain elements to enable deeper appreciation in works of art. In this instance, the argument extends to the physical context of Whitehall, and how the ability to interpret, apply and infer historical material regarding the Palace and festivities of the Tilts provides different understandings that enriches the users’ experiences, and transforms their perception of London. ____________________________________

King’s Lynn Mart Fair: Agriculture, isolation and the celebration turning inward Ian Trowell, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom Abstract: This paper examines the important and long-standing travelling fair at King’s Lynn, Norfolk. The fair dates back to a charter granted in 1537 and has evolved to represent the start of the travelling season for the various fairgrounds around the UK. Thus, the fair has a dual function; a charter fair in its own right for the people of King’s Lynn falling upon Valentine’s Day, and also the

annual marking out of the new season for the travelling fairground community.

This is the first interpretation of ‘turning inward’, as the fair becomes a festival of itself. The paper will examine a number of historical factors that exist in tension to both celebrate and seemingly conspire against the sensibility of this fairground.

King’s Lynn is isolated and exposed, and sits within a region of agricultural tradition and an associated mode of harshness of living. At the same time the technological transfer between agriculture and the fairground was nurtured in this region in late Victorian times, with the principal character of Frederick Savage establishing his authority in King’s Lynn and linking himself inextricably to both the town and the fair. The fairground itself is situated on the Tuesday Market Place, a Georgian square flanked by high buildings in a bid to shut out the cold winds from the River Great Ouse and nearby Wash. Taking the form of an established fairground layout of side attractions, stalls and large rides, the fairground creates another inward enclosure within the Market Place.

However, the outer enclosure of Georgian facades is utilised in a number of ways drawing on architectural and artistic methods. The paper will examine some of these effects, drawing on the work of cinematic photographer Jeff Wall. ____________________________________

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette’s Vanity Fair – Fireworks and The Massacre in The Rue Royale Maja Vukušić, Zorica, University of Zagreb, Croatia Although the marriage between Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette has all the features of the festivities of a royal marriage, and includes various practices of entertainment of the people (festival), the interest of this celebration in this context is the massacre after the fireworks organized by the famous Ruggieri on the 30th of May 1770 on the Louis XV square (today Place de la Concorde). The tragic event resulted in more than 300 dead, with those that died a few days later of their injuries. The architecture of the square, a storm and the poor police organization were the main causes of the disaster. Here we would like to examine the specific nature of this incident – after the destruction of the fireworks (30000 rockets), the mob goes down La Rue Royale, as well as those in coaches, which causes an unseen bustle. The event itself provoked a number of serious consequences: King’s family sent more than 150000 livres to the families. Various pamphlets (addressed to Jérôme Bignon) and satires show that the Parliament itself had to address the seriousness of the problem. This incident, although it arouses only after various ceremonies of marriage of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, clearly shows the impact that architecture has on history and everyday life of a certain society and the importance of the Haussmann’s renovation of Paris. Linking a specific event, such as this royal marriage, with a very specific space (Place de la Concorde, Rue Royale), we would like to examine the interdependence of an event

and the space where this event takes place. ____________________________________

Urban Inundation: Biennale di Venezia as an Agent of Transformation Phoebe Crisman, University of Virginia, United States of America Venice is a city of festivals—regattas, religious processions, Carnevale, and the art, architecture, theatre, cinema, music and dance festivals of the Biennale di Venezia. The Biennale is a festival of ephemerality and permanence that continually transforms the city’s physical structure and cultural landscape.

Unlike Worlds Fairs, Olympics, and other International Expositions that move between cities and leave leftover architecture in their wake, the Biennale was established in a permanent location in Venice—first the Palazzo dell’Esposizione in 1895, then expanding into permanent national pavilions in the Giardini della Biennale, and now temporarily inhabiting historic structures and campi throughout the city. This paper examines how temporal and dispersed Biennale exhibitions have appropriated and further commodified public spaces, while regenerating the Arsenale and other historic buildings. This series of internationalized megaevents creates cultural capital within the globalized art world, generates tourist revenue for city businesses, and produces urban spectacle through the process of festivalization. The Biennale is read as both as a globalized and commodified tourist festival separate from Venetian culture, and as a meaningful generator of new forms of public engagement as focus has shifted from the display of art objects within purpose-built architecture to the experience of festivalgoers dispersed across the city. This transformation aligns with the larger societal turn toward an experience economy and specifically the ‘aesthetics of experience’ in art and architecture. ____________________________________

ROOM P421A: AM Disciplinary Tensions: The Groningen Music Video Festival Pavilions Annalise Varghese, University of Queensland, Australia “What a Wonderful World! Music Videos in Architecture” was a music video festival, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, from August to October, 1990. The festival involved the design of five pavilions by Deconstructivist architects: Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. This represented an intersection of two rising trends: temporary pavilions as objects of display and music videos as discrete works of art in their own right. These structures were also part of a broader urban renewal strategy in Groningen, to revitalize the

city’s southern canal area and demarcate the future site of the Groninger Museum.

Their aesthetic variety and inclusion of music videos would also introduce the public to the non-conventional aesthetics and art forms to expect in the future museum.

This paper investigates the role of the Video Pavilions in Groningen, in a historical moment where the phenomenon of exhibiting avant-garde pavilions in urban space was gaining currency, while, examining how these structures challenge the discipline of architecture in various ways. Firstly, with the creation of abstract, experimental pavilions, the architectural identity of the commissioned designers resided not in their construction expertise, but in their creative process and products.

Secondly, although the pavilions embody architectural concepts, facilitate an exhibition program, and support urban renewal, their architectural status is complicated: by their recognition as an art object within the Groninger Museum, and their commercial role hosting music videos and involving stararchitects to brand Groningen as “the architectural spearhead of the Netherlands.”1 This paper will explore these disciplinary tensions, by tracing the development of the Video Pavilions, and their shifting role—between architectural, artistic and commercial domains—from their inception to the present day. ____________________________________

A Vigorous Corrective: The Ulster ‘71 Festival Sarah A Lappin, Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom The Ulster ’71 Festival was held on a site in the Botanic Gardens, one of Belfast’s main civic spaces, from May to September 1971. When originally conceived, the festival was to play a minor part in events explicitly aimed at marking the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Northern Ireland as a political entity with a devolved government, while also implicitly celebrating fifty years of Unionist Party rule.

By the time of the opening ceremony of Ulster’71, all reference to the 50th anniversary of the state had been purged from the official publicity, and the Unionist government was under sustained attack from civil rights and nationalist protesters, more extreme elements of Unionism and a critical UK Government. In August 1971, during the course of the Festival, internment without trial was introduced in Northern Ireland, resulting in a violent backlash.

This paper questions how architecture and architects of the time were used as a means to both parade a constructed history and uplift a population in a fraught and disjointed period. Those planning Ulster’71 were keen to use the architectural high modernism widely adopted in the region as a means of setting Northern Ireland in an internationally significant context. However, as with the Northern Ireland Festival of Britain exhibition 20 years earlier, local architects

were not trusted with the exhibition design itself; the commission was given to the London-based Central Office of Information.

Our paper uses primary materials including documentary and television footage recorded at the time, and in doing so, interrogates attempts at celebration through festival in the midst of some of the most violent years in recent UK history.

The project draws on previously published research by the authors, adding to a growing understanding of architectural history of mid-late 20th century in this part of Europe. ____________________________________

Urban Practices And Political Festivals of Hamas In Gaza: Serious Consequences And Hidden Messages.

Hala Alnaji; Edi Alnaji, Royal Institute of Arts, Sweden The urban environment is an active theatre, rich of many social behaviors and practices. In political festivals, activities are often directed towards urban areas and spaces that have a certain symbolism among the folk in the city. In Gaza, since Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, the Hamas-led launch ceremony is held annually. Over the course of ten years, this periodic event has produced a variety of urban practices that were developed each time to appear somewhat different. Every time, the urban space and these festive practices -even spontaneous or organized- work side by side to present a profound reading of what is going on in the Palestinian society in Gaza. The research discusses Hamas’s approach in dealing with the urban environment by displaying the most prominent analytical and descriptive observations on Hamas’ festive practices in the urban environment. The research structure goes through two main sections; a reading of the urban reality of the Gaza Strip under Hamas government, and political festivals, public space, and identity section. The research will use the qualitative research methodology and apply a combination of two approaches; the phenomenology approach together with the ethnographic approach. In the ethnographic method, the investigation will focus on visual ethnography which depends on using photographs as a methodological tool. On the other hand, the phenomenological approach will help in investigating the external appearance and inner consciousness of phenomena based on memory, imagery, and meaning.

The research findings will show how the urban practices of festivals can be used as a means of emphasizing the role played by architecture and active urban space in influencing issues of national identity at the political and social levels alike.

ROOM P419: AM Sound of The City: The Impact of Popular Music Performance on Liverpool’s Urban Space Robert Kronenburg, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom Popular music performance is an important aspect of the cultural and social life of cities. It is not just a leisure activity and form of entertainment, but also a vehicle for personal expression for both musicians and audiences. It can represent local viewpoints that in turn foster a stronger sense of regional identity, which enriches urban life.

Furthermore, it has the power to positively alter locals’ and visitors’ appreciation of the way a particular space is perceived, and their impression of the city in general.

It can create lasting memories for individuals, places of shared experience for audiences, and thereby instigate new ideas about the ways in which urban space can and should be used, in some instances leading to permanent change in the design and operation of the public realm. This paper examines the impact of popular music performance on outside city space, focusing in particular on urban festivals. It explores how temporary and transient events can impact on the use of city space and how, in some cases, this can lead to beneficial change, improving design strategies for new urban environments. By examining in detail Liverpool’s free urban music festivals, which are the largest in Europe, it analyses the potential that popular music performance has to be a catalyst in the creation of memorable city spaces for visitors and inhabitants. The essay utilises the author’s recent detailed research for Historic England on the city of Liverpool (Cohen and Kronenburg, Liverpool’s Musical Landscapes, Historic England, 2017), which was named a UNESCO City of Music in 2016, and has developed a pro-active urban space music programme as part of its 2008 European Capital of Culture legacy. ____________________________________

The Pope, the Park and the City: Dublin, 1979 Gary A. Boyd, Architecture, Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland; Brian Ward, Architecture, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland A green mound surmounted by a cross is the only remnant in Dublin’s Phoenix Park of the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979. The 29th September saw over a million people – more than the entire population of the city – gathered to celebrate the first papal mass on the island. It was a demonstration of religiosity at a scale never witnessed in Ireland since. The congregation, serried in corrals, was ‘like a small American city, on a grid with major and minor routes, forty and thirty feet wide’ (Tallon, 1979).

Other measurements calibrated time as well as space. The pope-mobile, with

a top speed of five miles per hour, took precisely forty-seven minutes to weave an exit through 3.925 miles of exuberant crowds. The Papal Mass in 1979 was the last of a triad of Catholic festivals in the Phoenix Park. It followed the centenary of Catholic Emancipation (1929) and the Eucharistic Congress (1932), both of which saw temporary structures erected and vast numbers assembling on the same site. These earlier events included congregational processions through Dublin, designed to Catholicise an eighteenth-century city built largely by the Protestant Anglo-Irish. In contrast, the 1979 events were confined to the park and consequently Dublin and its suburbs were virtually empty, a city peopled only by ‘agnostic poets’ (Kiberd in Courtney, 2012). This paper explores the sociospatial complexities and connectivities of the two cities created that day: ‘the visit’ with its temporary and post-modernist use of modernist architectures in an assemblage of rarefied meanings; and the vacated city, created equally temporarily outside the spectacle. The first elicited an architecture of spectacle, ordered movement and paraphernalia. The second, subsequently depicted in literature, is a space of occasional violent disorder and dissent, occupied by religious and sexual minorities, and acted out within existing, nondescript urban fabric. Both spaces are fictive. But read together they seem to define a past and future for the island, situating the architectures of the papal visit as the fulcrum of a nation whose secularisation, like its previous religiosity, is at once contradictory and incomplete. ____________________________________

Collective Representation and The Festal Architecture of Charles Correa: A Journey To Find The Spiritual Through The Experiential Meaning of Emptiness Vikrant Singh, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand The purpose of the paper is to bring into light the way in which Indian architect Charles Correa dealt with the question of collective representation and the meaning of this collective representation in his architecture through a selected project – Jawahar Kala Kendra (JKK), Jaipur. Correa in his writings reiterated the point that architecture should be the expression of society’s values and beliefs and used the terms such as ‘sacred’ and ‘deep structures’ in this regard. He connects human desire to experience the unknown with the sacred and suggests mythic imageries as one of the sources where one can find the sacred.

According to him, the expression of the sacred as shunya, no-thing or by the term Brahman is permanently engraved on the minds of people and hence it is one of the major deep structures that exists in Indian society. Festivals too are some of the creations embodying this notion (Brahman) and Correa attempted to make the project as an expression of the same.

The paper begins with the discussion around the terms, ‘sacred’ and ‘deep

structures’ that Correa used in connection with the collective representation. The research indicates that as per Correa, the notion of ultimate reality or emptiness is one of the meaningful forms of collective representation. The paper then progresses with a hermeneutic-phenomenological reading of the project through the theme of emptiness. The reading begins with the illumination of the relationship between the movement and the notion of ultimate truth/reality as expressed in the project.

This is followed by bringing forth the varied dimensions associated with Correa’s notion of emptiness in the project. The paper arrives at the conclusion that the Hindu and Buddhist philosophy influences Correa’s notion of the emptiness. ____________________________________

ROOM P440: AM Ming-Tang As Both Architecture and Infrastructure For Chinese Traditional Festivals Xiang Ren, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom; Jing Qiao, PROJECT X 21, United Kingdom This paper reviews Ming-Tang, an archetype which held thirteen traditional Chinese festivals in Chinese ancient capital Xi’an City, by placing this architecture of festivals within a framework combing the lineage, the family-clan, the annual cycle, the seasonal worship and everyday rituals.

Xi’an City holds extremely rich cultural layers manifested in its ancient city festivals; the festival of city had been produced and reproduced within a whole cultural-specific time-space institution through Ming Tang as both architecture and infrastructure. Ming-Tang was constructed as a miniature model of the cosmos, a place to communicate with the supreme deity. As so it was supposed to interpret branches of humanistic and scientific knowledge as a whole. Thus its manifold symbolism was governed by highly abstract elements such as measurement, direction and geometric shape, but all of which have been architectural references derived from the study of the innermost city. The festivals in Ming-Tang provided a shared way for people to identify with the world around them, the past that has led to the present, and the future that may unfold.

In this way this minor-type of festival architecture would be only reproduced and reimagined through local practices and acts for contemporary urban festivals.

The conclusion is that Ming Tang acted as both architecture and infrastructure can constantly reflect to the changing time, seasons, surroundings, and most of all, the city festivals by interweaving two, the sacred and the profane.

Anzac Day at The Shrine of Remembrance: A Socio-Spatial Construction Nesha Naidoo, the University of Melbourne, Australia Historically, the urban ritual in Melbourne has served to demonstrate social values and community ties, particularly in its processional form. One such occasion is Anzac Day – an annual civic ritual designed to remember the sacrifice in war. Ritual events in designed public space are understood primarily as tools of manipulation and control and have attracted little attention from architectural scholars concerned with the daily lived experience. Thus, the different ways in which new social relations are socially and spatially constructed through monument, memory, and ritual are overlooked. This paper surveys Anzac Day at the Shrine of Remembrance [the Shrine] exploring its spatial history, varied meanings and public behaviour, from its design conception to its early use (1924 - 1971). It considers ritual as a reforming social practice not purely a coercive or imposed framework. In facilitating highly choreographed programs exploiting various axial strategies, it is argued that the Shrine has shaped social cohesion. It has also provided a setting for protests and resistance; moreover, resistance gained momentum and developed its expression in response to the Anzac ritual’s hierarchical framework.

The original spatial form, emphasizing the interior/exterior condition, supported the social practice of pilgrimage and loosely framed initial Anzac Day ceremonies (from 1933). As Anzac Day evolved into a structured and exclusive commemorative ritual, controlling access to the inner Shrine, protests challenged the ritual’s prescribed spatial order. Later, in 1954, the Shrine’s forecourt was created to provide an immense gathering space for collective and personal memory; however, this too initiated dissent as the Anzac ritual imposed further spatial differentiation in the open space. Today, the ritual hierarchies have mostly dissolved, particularly in the ceremonial component; and the spatial hierarchies have been reworked to encourage new interpretations. ____________________________________

The Town of Witches: Triora Grace A Williams, Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom Renowned for being the ‘Salem of Europe’, Triora in the Province of Imperia, Liguria is the site of the last witchcraft trial in Italy.

In 1588, the steep medieval fortress town experienced severe famine, which resulted in the conviction of a group of local women for practices of witchcraft. The accusations of demonic misdemeanour were fuelled by a series of nighttime meetings, held at a ramshackle building on the perimeter of the village, now known as the Cabotina.

Despite the gruesome nature of its past, with nearly all of the villages witchcraft convictions resulting in burning, Triora has embraced its esoteric connotations.

Each year the village celebrates an annual witchcraft festival, known as the Strigora,

during which the town becomes a mecca for witch enthusiasts worldwide, its narrow streets teeming with traditional and contemporary depictions of bewitchment.

The impact of the festival has permanently altered the context of the village as a small agricultural town. Since the initiation of Strigora, it has been transformed into a jewel box of souvenir shops brimming with witchcraft ephemera, as well as several permanent public artworks depicting various formulations of ‘the hag’. In addition, the village has become famous for hosting other curious festivals throughout the year, including a festival of mushrooms and snails, alongside the more familiar celebration of Halloween.

This paper responds to the theme ‘City Festivals in History’ exploring the juxtaposition between the macabre event of historical witch burning and its contemporary representation in the festival of Strigora as lighthearted, based on the mixed iconography of woman as witch. This will include a discussion of the power re-enactment and oral narratives have in generating areas of alternative cultural significance. ____________________________________

Festival Games Within the Urban Context Luke Nagle, MW Architects, London, UK Throughout Europe many idiosyncratic mob games have emerged in specific locals to celebrate the religious feasts and to reinforce a sense civic identity.

Such games are often open to anyone to participate, or at least free to all to spectate, offering an egalitarian and inclusive form of communal engagement in the ‘public’ space. Unlike the pomp and strict hierarchies of the games of antiquity or modern day sports these games are often more anarchic and don’t require specific stadia. Instead they take part in the street, the piazza and the everyday spaces of the town where they are played.

Whilst the rules of these games are often loose there are well established traditions including processional routes and victory salutes that in some cases have developed over hundreds of years. The traditional pageantry and the games themselves are often largely shaped by the physical conditions that they are played in.

This paper will begin to explore what effect the existing architectural context, both physical and cultural, has had in defining these games and their associated traditions; or if any of the games has to some extent had an influence on shaping the context that it is played within so that the festival and its context influence and shape each other. The main discussion is how the game by being rooted to its locus becomes part of a locally distinctive character and have become woven into the social fabric promoting a sense of civic identity to this day. To do this it will look at a selection of festival games played in Italy, particularly Tuscany, and by way of contrast throughout Britain. It is hoped that this comparison may elucidate to what extent the influence of civic identity and the church has effected the development of the games.

The City as Spectacle: The 1852 Christiania Student Meeting in The Illustrated Press Iver Tangen Stensrud, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway On the afternoon of 24 June 1852, the inhabitants of the city of Christiania (now Oslo) had gathered together on the fortress pier to great 288 Swedish university students from Uppsala arriving by steamship. The reason for the commotion was a giant student party.

For four days, Norwegian and Swedish students remade the small Norwegian capital of about 30,000 inhabitants into a site for an urban spectacle. This paper investigates this student festival through its coverage in the Norwegian illustrated press. Urban festivals, gatherings and parades were an essential part of the vision of modern urban culture created in the illustrated press in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, new image making techniques combined with developments in printing technology made printed images available to the public on unprecedented scale. English magazines, based on wood engravings, like the Penny Magazine and the Illustrated London News were leading in this regard. But the small provincial capital of Norway had its own illustrated papers. After being essentially a provincial centre in Denmark Norway, Christiania became the capital a new independent Norwegian state in 1814. By the mid-nineteenth century, a new royal palace and a new university was just finished. This expanded the centre of Christiania westward. Much of the visual material from the student meeting was centred on this newly established civic centre. Building on established visual conventions of the illustrated press, the Christiania papers reimagined the new civic centre in the provincial capital as stage set for an urban spectacle. ____________________________________

Ephemeral Dreams of Organic Totality. Adolf Schirmer´s Exhibition Pavilion At Tullinløkka, Oslo, Norway, 1883 Mathilde Simonsen Dahl, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway “The bright woodwork between the green leafs, the neat corner turrets and the architectural – made in wooden style – adorned entrances, in the middle the main tower, with windows in coloured glass making a beautiful reflection, and the many flags above and between, would even alone, without the beautiful surroundings, make a distinguished impression of the capital’s exhibition.”

Morgenbladet, 1883. The 1883 national industry and art exhibition in Christiania, now Oslo, was nestled between the city’s most important new civic buildings, the University and the Sculpture Museum, and only a few blocks away from the Royal Palace. It was thus sited in the midst of an urban streetscape, unlike the common arrangement of industry exhibitions as complexes sited in large

parks. The site, Tullinløkka was politically and publicly invested long before it was weaved into the urban fabric, and has accommodated urban festive events in connection to political and national days of celebration, exhibitions and public sportive events ever since the city was founded as capital in 1814. Still undeveloped, it remains to this day a focal point in the debates of territorial presence of culture, commerce and academe in the city. In 1883, exhibition architect Adolf Schirmer, who only two years before completed his fathers project for the National Gallery/ Sculpture museum, was engaged in the debates and realization of the physical development at Tullinløkka and its surroundings since 1870. Prophetically they stated in the 1870´s that the site should be planned in totality, and not peace-meal, as it otherwise would always remain unresolved. For the occasion of the exhibition, Schirmer´s pavilion filled the site, and was in addition loaded with references to rejected features for the museum. This paper investigates the ephemeral scenery of the exhibition along two entangled axis: Did the architect use the event to critique and propose permanent solutions for the city? And if, did the context of festivity and the ephemerality of the buildings affect the public´s perception of inherent references between the transient and permanent buildings? ____________________________________

THE SHELL: PM ‘Heinrich Tessenow’s Festive Matrix’ Gerald Adler, University of Kent, United Kingdom The ephemeral nature of festival structures – here today, gone tomorrow – has made it seem secondary in importance to more sedate, lasting architecture. This is certainly the case when one considers the topic from a historical perspective. While my Banister Fletcher does indeed (just) indicate the presence of the velarium on its illustrations of the Roman Colosseum, we have become used to seeing historic, monumental structures, which invariably hosted festivities or festive rites, either stripped back to their architectonic essence or reduced to the skeleton of their present, ruined, state.

Yet it is striking how things festive, ephemeral, ritualistic and celebratory have become normalised within modern design, a change that began sometime in the twentieth century and has continued apace. One only has to consider how reviled the Crystal Palace was in 1851, as ‘serious’ architecture, compared with its centennial child, the Festival of Britain, which gave its name to an entire era and style in mid-twentieth-century Britain.

Of course, serious and Angry Young Men (aka the Brutalists) denigrated this lighthearted, and well-loved, architecture, but they seemed to struggle to design anything to equal, in festive terms, the Dome of Discovery, the Skylon or indeed the Royal Festival Hall, whose year-round

music festival still delights the crowds on London’s South Bank.

This paper seeks to find one of the precursors of the twentieth-century’s growing embrace of festive architecture in the work of the German reform architect, Heinrich Tessenow. Throughout his oeuvre, both with his influential drawings and carefully controlled buildings and garden pergola structures, Tessenow built on Gottfried Semper’s theory of ‘dressing’ a raw, tectonic frame, as expressed in the latter’s famous Style writings, as a prelude to later architects’ validation of the frame as aesthetic device in its own right. The frame is the cheap-and-cheerful structural form erected, then dressed, to set the scene for almost any kind of shortterm event. If today inventive designers such as Patrick Bouchain continue to dress low-cost frames to great effect, if not affect, they owe a debt of gratitude to the ‘first generation’ Modernists, among them Tessenow, for setting the scene. ____________________________________

The Figure and The Building: Flux in The Early Illustrated London News Anne Hultzsch, University College London, United Kingdom When the illustrated newspaper was ‘invented’ in 1842 by Herbert Ingram, festivals soon became prime content for the young Illustrated London News, as well as its plentiful competitors. Ranging from Lord Mayor’s Days and processions of the Temperance Movement to pageants abroad in honour of the visiting Queen Victoria, illustrated papers were full of images and descriptions of spectacle in flux – including spectacular architecture and people, joined in celebration of the event. It is this relationship between the figure and the building, in word and image, that this paper proposes to investigate.

Often, these images presented figures as spectators, that is, with the back to the viewer of the image, thus embodying newspaper readers and immersing them within the spectacular. At other times, people are turned into actors, whether or not part of an arranged parade, by facing readers and performing for them. Something similar happened to architecture: buildings, whether permanent or ephemeral structures, stand either as mute background, containing the action, or become part of the action, guiding, shaping, and often crowning the movement of the festival. What does this corresponding duality of the figure and the building in the illustrated press say about the contemporary role of architecture in the emerging public sphere? Was it reflected also in the verbal descriptions?

And what is its effect on the seminal claim that print served to freeze things on the page (Eisenstein, 1979)?

Jonathan Crary has argued that ‘spectacle is not primarily concerned with a looking at images but rather with the construction of conditions that individuate, immobilize, and separate subjects’ (Suspensions of Perception, 2001). This paper takes this claim and applies it to the subjects represented in the illustrated press of

the mid-nineteenth century – figures and buildings – in order to trace the relationship between the built, the printed, and the flux of the festival. ____________________________________

BONS SONS Festival: Designing Permanent Carnival, Experiencing Total Mobilisation Krzysztof Nawratek, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom; Kasia Nawratek, Birmingham City University, United Kingdom; Mário Caeiro, Instituto Politécnico de Leiria / ESAD.cr, Portugal, Agata Wiórko, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Portugal The paper discusses the process of (re) creating Cem Soldos village as a social and cultural subject. This process of “subjectification” is strengthened by villagers organising BONS SONS festival.

Cem Soldos is a tiny village of about one thousand inhabitants in Portugal.

The festival focuses on contemporary Portuguese music and attracts about thirty thousand visitors every year. All organisation activities take place in the village - from management, logistics and accommodation to PR and stage building. Income generated by the festival is an important part of the village and its inhabitants’ budgets. The paper discusses tensions between spatially fixed location of the event, social construction of the festival organisation, its national, and possibly international, reach. We will analyse the village and the festival in a framework of Ernst Junger’s notion of total mobilisation and Mikhail Bakhtin narrative of carnival, and we will argue that the festival allows residents of the village to overcome alienation but in the same moment it reproduces existing social hierarchies. ____________________________________

Following a Model: St. Stephen’s Salford and The Exceptional Spectacle in The Whit Friday Procession Stephen Walker, University of Manchester, United Kingdom In 1895, the Manchester Guardian reported the Catholic Whit Friday Procession of that year was ‘witnessed by about a quarter of a million people lining the streets along the route, [and] has never been surpassed.’[1] This is half the story, as the Catholic ‘Whit Walk’ was mirrored on Whit Monday by an Anglican Procession with a longer tradition. Established as a counter attraction to the (in)famous Kensal Moor Races also held at Whitsuntide, the Whit Walks can be considered an early form of temperance festival.

Although rival events, the Catholic and Anglican processions adopted very similar spatial dynamics (involving coordinated processions to, through and away from the city) and similar appearances, with each parish parading behind its “big banner” which bore the parish’s name and an

illustration of a Saint or biblical event, and accompanied by its own band (a format that has striking similarities with Trade Union marches and iconography emerging around the same time). There is little scholarly work done on the Whit Walks.

One exception is Charlotte Wildman’s cultural geographical writing, which argues that the ‘city centre [which provided] a powerful stage for the performance of a religious identity was therefore closely related to broader cultural meanings invested in the urban environment’.[2] This paper will present one instance of this performance of identity. In marked contrast to all conventional iconography paraded in the Manchester Whit Walks, one photograph from the Manchester Evening News, taken in 1954, shows the head of the procession from St. Stephen’s Salford in a moment of pause, gathered around a model of their church. In contrast to all the other parishes processing as witness to the birth of their church as a religious organization, St Stephen’s parishioners seem to be parading behind their own building, following a simulacrum from beyond Manchester into the city centre. Consideration of this arrangement reveals complex dynamics of spectatorship and display, scale, temporality, piety, class and geography.

[1] Cited by Burns, The History and Memories of the Whit Walks, 2013, p.140.

[2] Charlotte Wildman. “Religious Selfhoods and the City in Inter-War Manchester.” Urban History 38, 2011, p.123. ____________________________________

A Better Life For More People: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt’s Contribution For The Festival of Britain Paola Zanotto, University of Architecture Venice, Italy “For over 100 years the exhibition has been the laboratory of architecture, the nursery of new ideas, and the testing ground of experiment”. On the 4th May 1951 the Town Planning Exhibition opened to the public as part of the Festival of Britain at Poplar, in East London, a district that was heavily bombed during the war and was, in itself, a demonstration of the ongoing process of post war reconstruction. Among other authors who contributed to the success of the event, one figure gave an original insight of the making of the festival: the English town planner, educator and editor Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. Already nominated secretary of the CIAM at the time, she was in the Building Research Sub-committee for the Festival and the script writer for the Town Planning Pavilion.

The exhibition was far from technical for the most part, showing an original interest for the city and its people, rather than plans and diagrams: the urban scenes were described from the point of view of different users, from a small child to elders. The New towns selected for the exhibition were illustrated through the social, working, private and civic life of their inhabitants. All projects displayed in the venue were fully delivered at least five

years before the opening of the festival, so that it was possible to test if the design and planning solutions applied had been successful. Tyrwhitt’s ideas about the exhibition reflected well her faith in real, tangible planning, and the organisation of the material aimed to raise interest from the general public. Innovation in the discipline wasn’t only demonstrated by the projects selected but also by the new tools and techniques introduced recently with the Town and Planning Act (1947), which Tyrwhitt contributed to promote and implement through her teaching activity.

Tyrwhitt’s experience can give access to an original point of view of what was the role of festivals in the crucial evolution of planning and architecture after the II World War, when aspiration for innovative proposals and political commitment for reconstruction interwove and were in great need of public consent. ____________________________________

Drama on The Urban Stage: Architecture and Festivals in Hellenistic Pergamon Ufuk Soyöz, Kadir Has University, Turkey This paper studies the urban setting of the Hellenistic city of Pergamon in relation to the state festivals. I consider festivals as spatialized practices and I argue that the Hellenistic urban setting was carefully designed as stages or arenas for the celebration and performance of state ceremonials. To this end, architects used symbolically charged design technologies borrowed from the Greek theater, such as skēnographia (scene painting and/or stage design) which was deeply informed by ancient optical science. I demonstrate that the perspectival developments in architecture, painting and sculpture were closely allied through application of skēnographia, forming a unified visual discourse that was highly attentive to the eye of the moving spectator. Specifically, skēnographia connected a series of images alongside an axis into a choreography that would correspond to the movement of users within architectural space during a festive event. To demonstrate my point, I reconstruct the spatial practices, such as theatrical performances, processions and sacrifice in three major sites of Hellenistic Pergamon, namely, the sanctuary complex of the theater of Dionysus and the famous Altar of Zeus, and by putting the historical evidence in conversation with the urban form. I illustrate these literary vignettes visually with 3D reconstructions of urban setting. With my methodology exploring urban fabric, art and architecture together with the festive events, such as processions and sacrifice, which occasionally took place in the context of a civic festival, this paper brings together the relevant source material traditionally discussed by specialized disciplines such as classics, art history, archaeology and history. My illustrations specifically produced by my research assistant for this paper gives clues as to the scenographic function of the urban setting.

ROOM P421A: PM Architecture, Heritage and The Festivalisation of The City Graeme Evans, University of the Arts, United Kingdom Key challenges face the conservation, reuse and valorisation of civic and industrial architectural heritage, particularly in everyday or neglected sites of the city.

This is apparent where the public realm is in retreat from local government expenditure cuts and asset disposal, and where regeneration - public and private promotes housing development or mixed use schemes which struggle to integrate and protect redundant industrial and municipal buildings. At the same time, the festivalisation of the city1 seeks to animate the urban, looking to celebrate not only the expansive city-as-brand, but to seek out new areas which combine placemaking for local residents with a novel visitor experience2. The conflation of culture with regeneration has been a long established strategy to rebrand an area through investment in cultural icons, public realm schemes and transport alongside new/refurbished housing3.

However, less favoured locations seldom attract such investment or offer the scale of brownfield land required. Areas of the city and town centres that contain legacies of civic and industry such as town halls, mills and factories, have looked to adaptive re-use, often incorporating arts and creative industry activity (small creative enterprises, artist workspace/ studios) and increasingly host festivals which are used for design engagement, competitions/charrettes and exhibitions as ‘urban imaginaries’. The London Festival of Architecture for example originated in 2004 as a biennale event located in a small but symbolic/fringe area of north London, where many architecture firms are concentrated. Today, this annual monthlong, city-wide festival includes open studios, student shows and installations, demonstrating perhaps that architecture can be ‘festivalised’. The paper considers the relationship between local industrial architecture and the festival as a form of architectural heritage engagement.

Using recent examples from east London: canalside industrial heritage buildings in Hackney Wick. The ‘arts festival’ event has been adapted to showcase and raise questions around the histories, ‘meanwhile’ and future uses of these buildings/sites, including speculative design schemes, temporary installations, exhibitions and performances that seek to capture the genius loci and aspirations for these architectural palimpsests.

Cinema Space: Spatial Representations of Empire & Cultural Identity, Bradford Centenary Square, 1902:2013, A Century of Public Performance and Ritual Jemma Browne, Birmingham City University, United Kingdom The paper examines the layering of cultural identities within urban space, through time. In particular that of migrant communities and the legacies of Empire; through a case study focusing on Bradford, it traces the cultural identities of these communities who arrived from Miripur in the 1950s. The cultural life of the city is diverse, reflecting the lived experience of its migrant populations; nowhere is this more evident than in the sphere of film.

Bradford became the Unesco World city of film in 2009, it is home to the National Museum of film and photography and each year there are a number of international film festivals. This particular piece of work was prompted by the occasion of the live filming of Bollywood Carmen in Centenary Square in Bradford in 2013. The event echoes a carnival and procession in 1902, also filmed in the square- I seek to reveal connections between these two events, exploring the trajectories of imperial legacies through cinema across continents and time. Using the theoretical writings of Seigfreid Kracaeur to analyse how early 20th Century cinema acted as a form as mass distraction from the new experiences of work in the modern city; his methodology explores everyday cultural life in such a way that the city becomes a cultural topography. The notion of cultural identity is deconstructed; the key themes are the construction of self and other this can be explored through the interior/ exterior or private/public expressions of identity and how the assemblage of groups participating in performance and ritual has expressed this. The paper introduces the idea that modernity is ideally expressed through the development of moving images, and will demonstrate this with a discussion a short film clip made in 1902 in Bradford Centenary Square, set against the later public performance of Bollywood Carmen, in the same space over 100 years later. It examines how national identity as expressed in public procession, ritual and performance has gradually transformed to incorporate new identities and asks how film and the spaces it is created and viewed in, and represents have played a role in this process. ____________________________________

Festivals in Spanish Mediterranean Historic Cites.

Urban Public Space Use in The Province of Alicante Pablo Marti; Leticia Serrano-Estrada; Almudena Nolasco-Cirugeda; Jesús López-Baeza, Univeristy of Alicante, Spain All Spanish Mediterranean historic cities have traditional religious and pagan festivals that take place in their urban

public space. The identification of which spaces are used by festivals in different cities is the aim of this research. Following this hypothesis, this paper proposes a methodology to identify if these festivals are held in the historic part of the city and in successful public spaces –plazas–.

The overall methodology comprises four stages. First, the eight most important historical cities of the province of Alicante and their relevant festivals are selected.

Second, the use of urban public space in each city by its most important festival is identified. Third, each historic city centre is delimited through cartographical and bibliographical review. Finally, the most relevant plaza of each city is recognised using data retrieved from the locationbased social media network Foursquare.

The correlations between the urban space used by festivals in each city and their historic centre as well as their most relevant plaza is analysed. The most important finding that have emerged from this study is the strong spatial relationship that exists between the most successful plazas, the historic city centre and the space used by festivals, which reinforces their traditional social character. ____________________________________

Festival as a Way of Thinking the City: Cappadox Halide İrem Erkan Kaya Sema Serim, Erciyes University, Turkey This study attempts to read the natural and built environment of Cappadocia from a conceptual viewpoint through the Cappadox Festival. Cappadox, which founds itself from within Cappadocia, makes room for the experience by suspending the routines of everyday life.

If experience is defined as a collaboration between memories and sensations, all festivals focusing on the city and Cappadox in particular reconstruct the built environment which has become invisible because of the routines of daily life, by the mediation of its own routines.

The multi-layered characteristics of Cappadocia is an advantage for mobilizing senses. Cappadox is a medium to create moments of sensation through suspending the image formed by collective time and the habit induced by daily routines.

Concerts at dawn, contemporary art installations, valley tramps invite visitors to rethink and sense Cappadocia.

Cappadox, also like other festivals, contains spectacle in Debord’s sense, and the festival environment itself is prone to turn into a spectacle on the basis of a stereotypical image of Cappadocia.

However, festivals as a moment that crystallizes everyday life are an attempt to prevent life from turning into a spectacle and people from being spectators and to open up an alternative space on the basis of sensation and experience. Dérive as a critical practice for Situationists and psychogeographers revolves around the idea of saving everyday life and built environment from being an object of mere viewing and re-establishing human being as an agent. The agent practicing dérive begin to sense the space only through the signification of time that they themselves created. It is precisely in this

sense that Cappadox offers a way out for those trying to produce new experiences in Cappadocia, through walking, tasting, touching and hearing. ____________________________________

On Playgrounds and The Archive: Joan Littlewood’s Stratford Fair, 1967-1975 Ana Bonet Miro, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom The deprivation ravaging East London’s urban life grounded the Fun Palace programme that Joan Littlewood initiated early 1960s. If the democratic and transformative agency of the playground became the master image of the cultural programme, it is the encounter with the local government politics of slum clearance, which shaped Stratford Fair between 1967 and 1975.

Coordinated by Littlewood and addressed to the local youth, it was an educational initiative to reclaim public land through the production of community-led and temporary playgrounds and fair events in the vacant sites near The Theatre Royal.

The democratic ends and systematic means of Stratford Fair were constituted by the interweaving of playground and archive. Scholarship to date has discussed Stratford playgrounds as a trigger for the political imagination of minority local youths, but has left unexplored the central role that media played in the construction of its public agenda. This paper explores the archive as an active site for Stratford Fair. Drawing on the concept of cultural techniques, the analysis of a range of records grounds the discussion of how these objects and the practices that they constitute speak politically about the fair’s public ambition. It also reflects upon the distributed agency of the archive as site of representation of the fair, to question the lack of attention to Stratford Fair in architectural scholarship to date. ____________________________________

Type, Innovation Districts and Festival(s) of Knowledge Katharina Borsi, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom; Chris Schulte, Publica Urban Consultants, United Kingdom London’s Bloomsbury district has been called one of the leading Knowledge Districts in the world. The biomedical cluster along Euston Road links the longestablished higher education institutions in Bloomsbury with the more recent and on-going development of a creative cluster in Kings Cross. This dense urban fabric now accommodates an institutional thickness of universities, museums, research institutes, libraries and other typologies of knowledge. In recent decades two concurrent trends have emerged in the architectural and urban spaces of Bloomsbury. Firstly, a proliferation of large atria or foyers with complex interfaces between public and private domains has emerged as a recurring spatial signifier of new knowledge typologies.

These collective, public or semi- public

spaces are designed to promote social interaction, knowledge exchange and dialogue between different users, across institutions and the wider public. Secondly, many of these institutions actively occupy the adjacent public space or street once or several times a year through planned events, fairs or exhibitions. The degree shows of design schools like the Architectural Association, the Bartlett or Central St. Martin, the weekly street market of UCL’s Makers workshop; the cultural programme hosted by the British Library in its foyer and forecourt, and the showcase and networking events of the Knowledge Quarter umbrella organisation all celebrate, cross-fertilise, disseminate and showcase their respective contributions to “knowledge” across disciplines and constituencies, including the general public. This paper argues that the generalisation of key interior quasipublic spaces in knowledge typologies and the proliferation of public events in urban spaces jointly engender a particular culture of festivals of knowledge. While their proponents celebrate these spaces and events as evidence that the ivory tower has been broken down and that new, more inclusive forms of knowledge industries are in the ascendency, critics are concerned that the new knowledge economy exacerbates social polarity, and that the privatisation of some of these public spaces as well as the interiorisation of quasi-public spaces threatens the democratic ideal of embodied by more conventional forms of public space.

This paper explores the phenomenon of festivals of knowledge as a complex nexus of typological, urban, educational and political transformation; a nexus that potentially narrows social differentiation, as much as it provides new and enriching urban associations. ____________________________________

ROOM P419: PM Orchestrating Cultural Events, “Coming Together in Mouttalos”, Paphos ’17 Curating Project Maria Hadjisoteriou; Angela K. Petrou; Sevina Floridou, University of Nicosia, Cyprus This paper will discuss ideas on how an orchestrated cultural event, a “festive” activity, can be designed to enhance an urban experience thus create an opportunity for a long term transformation of a neglected urban environment.

The case study presented is a proposed Street Event “Coming together in Mouttalos” which is part of the program of the Paphos 17 Cultural Capital of Europe.

The project began by creating mappings of the neighbourhood of Mouttalos, a former Turkish Cypriot area of Paphos, constructing a new reading of the site. A shift of focus from the built infrastructure to the soft network was made, detecting multiple and complex relations of dependence and autonomy. This study provided a more informed and diverse vision for the neighbourhood and therefore the researcher assumed the role of curator

of public space, initiating small scale public interventions and bringing together local community and artists.

The curatorial project proposed a new cultural path which to reveal the prolific history of the site and explore new spatial possibilities. Narrative ‘stops’, thresholds and ‘paths’ weaving through the smaller scale, Pop up events and temporal interventions (street markets, exhibitions, screening, bi-communal artist’s events) are planned along the path, aiming to uncover the settlement’s unique identity, bring together local residents and visitors, provoke dialogue, create alternative interpretations, and memories of the site and at the same time reveal the urban potential of a temporary urban festival for the city.

This study highlights the opportunity to facilitate the temporary use of empty spaces for use during the event, with the intention of retaining these sites as small open spaces to be used by the community. It is considered that the right kind of temporary use can help develop a sense of place and speed up long term or permanent development of the site.

Therefore it could give a possible insight to the question on “How is urban experience enhanced, altered, or framed by festivals? ____________________________________

The Politics of Display and Topographical Imaginaries in Singapore’s National Day Parades Jolene W.H. Lee, Harvard University, United States of America The National Day Parade in Singapore is a yearly event to celebrate the independence of the island nation and has a highly ritualised process that includes formal ceremonial and informal performative and festival elements. It was started with the intent to inspire feelings of national pride and a sense of belonging as part of the sovereign state’s larger national education mechanism, borne out of a necessity to establish a common identity after an independence that was not of the common will of the state and a diverse, multi-ethnic population. Sites of national events of such scale and significance are typically imbued with their own significance to national history and are sometimes even highly charged with their own tropes and more importantly, remain a constant every year. In Singapore’s less than sixty years of sovereignty, the sites of these events have moved multiple times. The paper sets the premise that the sites of the National Day Parades through the years are reflective of the states’ shifting national agendas. The argument is framed through three different sites -- (1) the Padang, a ceremonial green space in the middle of the historic city centre (2) the National Stadium, a sports complex that marked a period of intense building of national facilities (3) the ‘Float’ at Marina Bay -- a floating stage set in the waters of an artificial reservoir which also acts as the new city centre’s waterfront -- arguing that the shifting sites suggest a certain fluidity in the markers of national identity and a detachment from concepts of ‘land’ typically implicit in the formation of such narratives. The paper culminates

in the Jubilee year’s celebrations, where multiple sites were activated and the celebrations were capped with an event entitled ‘The Future of Us’. The event speculated on life in Singapore in 2030 and was sited at the ‘Gardens by the Bay’, created on reclaimed land in the new city centre’s waterfront -- inviting the provocation that perhaps national identity in the Singapore context is dependent on the celebration of projected topographical imaginaries more than understandings of historical contexts. ____________________________________

The Social Architecture of Contemporary Cultural Festivals: Connecting People, The Environment and Art in The Setouchi Triennale Simone Shu-Yeng Chung, National University of Singapore, Singapore Unlike traditional festivals that have emerged out of the social life of local communities, contemporary cultural festivals are state or local government creations guided by post-industrial economic aspirations. These festivals’ potential to benefit existing communities, create local business opportunities and enrich social life following repeated manifestations over the long run, is significant. They are viewed as a positive source for socio-economic regeneration.

The Setouchi Triennale, an art festival involving twelve islands and two port cities in Japan’s Inland Sea, was conceived to engage the existing landscape-cumseascape, its inhabitants and showcase the area’s rich history and resources.

The commodification of experience of site-specific works created for the festival underscores the vital function of space. Whilst experience may be ephemeral, it is consumed spatially and requires the manipulation of material culture and environmental cues around us: by organising elements in space in conjunction with programming, one can calibrate experience into an event. This paper inserts a spatial dimension to the discussion on contemporary cultural festivals alongside an experience economy approach, arguing that they have evolved from offering novel experiences into transformative ones. By considering different scales, the festival’s degree of embeddedness in the urban-rural fabric is gauged by its visibility and reach. The human scale describes the attributes of sites activated to accommodate the artworks; an urban scale plots connections between locations by how existing infrastructure and support services are mobilised, and awareness of active crossborder flows of commodity, people and ideas is fundamental for understanding the network of relations governing festivals.

In traditional festivals, infrastructure and facilities constitute temporary structures that are dismantled when celebrations conclude; even paraphernalia central to Japanese religious processions such as the mikoshi are hidden from view at other times. Artworks from the triennale however tend to either remain for community use or endure as memory imprints.

Honneurs Et Applaudissements: Celebrating The First Jesuit Saints in 17Th Century France Iara A. Dundas, Duke University, United States of America In 1622 Pope Gregory XV canonized the first of the Jesuit saints, Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, alongside three saints from other religious orders. Though the ceremony and the canonization theatre placed more of a visual emphasis on Isidore the Laborer, Jesuit colleges throughout the Order’s provinces more than made up for this by producing sumptuous dramas and ephemeral spectacles, the latter of which were often commemorated in printed publications.

Many of these celebrations were held in 1622, implying an active campaign on the part of the Jesuit Order and its followers that pre-existed the Pope’s last-minute decision to include the Jesuits. The Jesuit College in Pont-à-Mousson presents an interesting case in this larger context in that the celebration was held a year after the fact and was a particularly extravagant affair that included an elaborate procession of over 1000 costumed students, ornate decorations that modified the architectural fabric of the college, and temporary structures that served as the stage for theatrical performances and pyrotechnic displays. This paper will discuss this and other examples of the celebrations in France on the occasion of the Jesuit canonizations, highlighting the political & monarchical messages on display alongside the religious, with a special emphasis on the use of ephemeral architecture, theatrical structures, ritual and procession to transform and manipulate space both within the semiprivate space of the college and in the public space of the city. ____________________________________

The Priest, the King, and The Street Vendor: Urban Allegories in Saul Steinberg’s Strada Palas (1966) Andreea Mihalache, Clemson University, USA All parades are gatherings of curious collections, but the parades in the work of architect-trained artist Saul Steinberg are like no others. Participants such as human typologies rather than individuals, fantastic creatures, animals, robots, geometric figures, oversized punctuation signs and numbers, all march together in processions that construct sharp and ruthless crosscuts through our society, exposing our faults, weaknesses, and failures.

In one particular drawing bearing the street name of his childhood home (Strada Palas), Steinberg intertwines two parades. They bring forth recollections of his native Bucharest from the early decades of the 20th century: imaginary and historic characters marching in an unlikely gathering parallel the procession of distinct architectural objects collected in a seemingly arbitrary sequence. At the

center of the image, between a royal figure and a mythical tree, Steinberg locates his family home. Weaving fact and fiction, the drawing is at the same time a mnemonic device attempting to stabilize the fluidity of memories and an eyewitness of specific historic and urban realities. ‘I had no rights, and went to school wearing a name plate with a number, like an automobile,’ Steinberg wrote about his Jewish childhood in the Romanian pre-World War II capital. Utilizing the focused lens of the festival, I will trace a microhistory where Steinberg constructs an allegorical narrative of the city as parade. I propose that the urban architecture transmogrifies into characters in a well-orchestrated drama. While the city-fragment portrayed in the image is the eclectic Bucharest of the 1920s, it also makes larger and more important statements about cities as contested places of power, where the ordinary and the extraordinary, the time of the everyday and the time of the carnival, royals and commoners, locals and guests inhabit, reclaim, and negotiate the same places. The destabilizing condition of the festival is extended to the nature of the city as a whole, which thus turns into another parade of colliding, yet intertwined, fragments. ____________________________________

Situated literature as Urban Gesture – A Cultural Concept Reinventing Myth in Lisbon Mário Jorge Caeiro; Nelson Guerreiro, Instituto Politécnico de Leiria / ESAD.cr, Portugal VICENTE is as urban culture festival dedicated to mythical public space.

Held in Lisbon annually since 2011, it is a cultural experiment where historical, legendary, aesthetic and spiritual aspects of an ancient narrative – the foundational arrival to Lisbon of the relics of St. Vincent in September 1147 – is performed as a cultural concept. An international programme, focused on Contemporary Art and Critical Thought, fuels a reinvention of Lisbon’s identity by means of artworks, urban interventions, performative walks and the regular publication of visual and textual material. The project is a gesture where the curatorial (Rogoff) meets strategic socio-political objectives: to acknowledge the local as the stage of a global awareness of immaterial heritage.

The whole is designed to create impactful urban images – urban aphorisms – lasting memories – narrative thinking, and most of all a new rhetoric for the cityscape of a European capital currently struggling against the decharacterisation of mass-tourism, gentrification and other overwhelming phenomena threatening the connection between citizenship and art. What is proposed in this paper is a critical retrospective of two dimensions of the project: the curatorial script and the literary texts and performative actions realized, both resonating intense dialogues not only within and between themselves – intratextuality – but also with the everyday of the place (Belém), the architecture and the urban form of Lisbon and specific urban elements of the city. The paper tells the history of a

cooperative process between the curator and the only author in the project who has been continually developing the character of a contemporary (St.) Vincent since the first edition. It further proposes the extradisciplinary concept of ‘situated literature’ as a model for audiences to participate and engage, individually and collectively, in an incremental public sphere, grounded in aesthetic coexperience and spatial co-existence. Myth becoming actual, lived and challenging. ____________________________________

ROOM P440: PM The Urban ‘Glenti’ Yiorgos Hadjichristou; Alessandra Swiny, University of Nicosia, Cyprus The Role of the Festival as an Urban Activist in the City: Over the last four years a series of urban festivities have taken place in the small village of Kaimakli which is a part of the capital city Nicosia, on the Island of Cyprus, and is divided in two parts by the Buffer Zone. The ‘Pame Kaimakli’ activities organized by residents took place in a variety of forms, rendering the neighborhood with both familiar and unprecedented urban vibes, scripting a new urbanscape for its inhabitants filled with stories and memories. These ephemeral and spontaneous injections into the traditional core of Kaimakli, enrich it with qualities of momentary urbanism.

Moreover, houses of the settlement become dynamically integrated into the festival and the event. The ‘open- windows’ activity offers pedestrians momentary glimpses of cultural spectacles that take place within the secrecy of the private realm. The ‘open-houses’ give the opportunity to the festival participants to spend a day within otherwise inaccessible private houses. The houses themselves became an essential active member of the festival itself. At the same time giant, inflatable structures ‘invaded’ the streets claiming the space from vehicles and offered new interpretations of public and semi-private activities. ____________________________________

A Festival Of Conversations: A Dialogical Arts Practice as a Method of Generating Conversations About a Place Jenny Peevers, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, West Midlands

Dialogical aesthetics is a term used by art historian and critic, Grant Kester,(2004) to describe a form of arts practice defined by the artist’s ability to listen and catalyse

understanding. My research explores dialogical arts practice as a method to generate conversations about people’s emotional connections to where they live. This paper specifically focuses on Re:connections, a pilot project forming contributing to this research. The project took place during June and July 2017 and involved artists using a dialogical approach and facilitating conversations with residents. The project took place in Lee Bank, Birmingham, an area that has been undergoing physically transformational regeneration since 2000 and known prior to the regeneration as an area of poor quality housing and social deprivation. Using art forms of sound, visual arts, poetry and photography the artists engaged approximately 160 residents in public spaces and community hubs in the area and culminated in a mini festival event in the local park where the artists presented and performed the work they created or co-created to residents and users of the park, shared a picnic and continued the conversations. The project explores dialogical arts practice as a form of sensory ethnographic methodology, and draws on disciplines of human geography, urban design and arts practice. ____________________________________

@TheDrawingRoom: A Festival of Architecture and Music Nic an Ríogh, Áine, University College Dublin, Ireland Following on from initial doctoral research in music and architecture, an impromptu festival exploring the architecture of Dublin’s Mountjoy Square emerged in 2013. Now in its fifth season the festival, @TheDrawingRoom, has evolved from this small focused investigation of Mountjoy Square to an extended, well attended festival exploring unique architectural spaces around Dublin through the mediums of music, art and architecture. @TheDrawingRoom is an exciting project designed to develop the public’s awareness of architecture, culture and heritage through a series of events in some of Dublin’s finest Georgian town houses. It aims to provide an alternative to the concert hall or gallery setting for audiences to enjoy music and art. The aim of the festival is to invite an audience into selected houses and to encourage the audience to interact and engage with the performances as well as with the architecture of each venue. The @ TheDrawingRoom festival stimulates people’s innate sense of curiosity, giving the audience an opportunity to explore the various homes, their beautiful interiors and interesting histories.

A review and study of @TheDrawingRoom has indicated its success in revitalising areas of the city once unknown to, and avoided by many. Coinciding with Dublin City Council led master planning efforts to develop North Georgian Dublin into the city’s Arts and Cultural Quarter, @ TheDrawingRoom continues to challenge audiences in their experience of historical architecture, while also photodocumenting each event and each building used. This record of a building and the visitors’ experience of the building is

valuable in itself for those interested in the redevelopment and maintenance of these once grand houses.

This paper will investigate the challenges of re-inhabiting and reusing historical buildings for festival events. It will also focus on how a festival such as @ TheDrawingRoom can have a positive effect in changing the public’s attitude towards historical buildings. Finally, it will discuss how the architecture of a space is essential in a festival experience; and how architecture, often overlooked or ignored, can become the focus point of a festival and its subsequent audience. ____________________________________

Slowing Perceptions, An Alternative To Spectacle: Interventional Performance Practices and Site-Specific Dance Works in City Spaces.

Polly Hudson, Birmingham City University, United Kingdom

Spectacle in performance has a long history: from the gladiators in arenas of the Roman Empire to modern outdoor performance practices. Post modern dance and performance rallied against that. An example of the development of a new approach to performance can be seen in 1965 when the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer wrote a ‘No Manifesto’ that begins with ‘No to spectacle, No to virtuosity’ (Rainer 1965).

This paper offers a view into current and past performance practices in city spaces, including some of my own as well as that of others. These performances took place in a variety of festivals, including Mind the Gap, the South Bank Centre, Oxford Dance Festival and Fierce festival, Birmingham.

Rather than unpack their influence specifically on festivals this paper instead examines their impact on the city, and on the body and engagement of the witness/ audience. It also foregrounds site specific performance, which ‘with it’s lack of proscenium arch and auditoria actively encourages the audience’s participation with the site and the performance’ (Hunter 2015: 35).

The Perpetual Festival of Scandinavianism in A Theme Park Proposal

Festival! Come Talk Politics With Socrates and His Alter-Ego the Athenian Stranger!

Gunnar Sandin, Lund University, Sweden

Renée Tobe, University of East London, London, UK

In this paper, a proposed Scandinavian Theme Park, envisioned to be located in Malmö, Sweden, close to the bridge to Copenhagen, Denmark, will cast light on the visual production of “otherness” in what could be called a “festivalesque” attempt to manifest the culture of a North European region. The theme park vision was produced collaboratively between Swedish planning authorities and globally working American design consultants. It existed as a projective possibility, discussed for more than ten years, but was eventually dropped as an idea in 2013, officially due to lack of managerial interest. The preliminary proposals promise reliable amusement design, with Scandinavian culture represented in the visualised proposals as cultural clichés referring to Nordic Mythology and Vikings. In this paper the reciprocal character of the negotiation of the proposal’s content, as well as its local anchoring is discussed. It is concluded that the possible sense of festival that such a contemporary amusement park might provide, including cultural renewal as well as nostalgic elements, did not in the design proposals elevate beyond stereotypes of Scandinavian culture. One may ask then, why the festival factor, in the sense a commonly owned and renewed manifestation of culture, got lost in this project? The post-colonial notion of the tactics of mimicry in cultural encounters are here addressed as a background, alongside a cultural semiotics that focuses on reciprocal cultural exchange. ____________________________________

This paper looks at festivals as dramatic settings for Platonic dialogues imbricating notions of civic justice and the forms for a just society with the city of Athens. In Ancient Greece, festivals were directly connected with political change and civic structures. Plato deliberately sets each of his dialogues in a specific dramatic setting to underscore the political message.

This setting is often a significant civic or religious festival whose focus highlights the political or philosophical content of the dialogue itself. For example, the Parmenides is set in the festival of the Great Panathenaea. During this festival, celebrated by Athenians with elaborate processions, Zeno and Parmenides arrived to honour Athena and help any Athenians interested in knowledge of divine things.

Zeno’s 40 logoi, most of which are now lost, offer paradoxical counterarguments.

Plato’s most famous dialogue, the

Republic, is set at the inaugural Festival of Bendis. The Republic begins: I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to offer a prayer to the goddess. (327) The decisive battle that restored democracy to Athens took place in the Temple of Bendis in the Piraeus. The place and the characters of the dialogue mirror the discussion of civic justice and governance since the dialogue takes place in the house of a family who suffered under the notorious Thirty. And of course the Symposium is a whole festival of love itself, a drinking party hosted by poet Agathon to celebrate his victory in the Dionysia, a dramatic competition. The Phaedo is set on the day of Socrates’ death, not a festive, but a momentous day, outside of Athens, giving distance to the events narrated. In The Laws, Plato’s final work, the Athenian Stranger, an unnamed man who acts and speaks very like Socrates, joins two others on a religious pilgrimage to the cave of Zeus in Knossos on the summer solstice.

They discuss lawmaking on the same path mythically taken every 9 years by King Minos to offer sacrifices to the labyrinth and ultimately the minotaur in return for which he received divine instructions in lawgiving.

9-15 JUNE 2018 BIRMINGHAM SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN GRADUATE SHOW Family Day – 9th June Inspired Festival – 9th - 15th June

Manifestation, Carnival or Theater, Framed Liberation During Political Carnival Narges Bazarjani, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain In February 1979, Tehran witnessed one of the most important urban demonstrations resulted in the fall of the Shah Regime and emergence of a Revolutionary Regime that lasts forty years later. Every February during these forty years, an official Parade takes place in the streets of Tehran to commemorate the original event. These Parades have turned into Political Carnivals, representing official values and messages of Regime. Applying the dramaturgical approach reveals that hiding the political struggle in Iran is the main aim of these carnivals. In fact, instead of being just official events, they have become the actual demonstration of complex processes and heterotypic voices of the society. Moreover, an evolution in the image of these Parades is notable which guides us to identify four significant periods of modern Iranian history.

EURAU 2018 ALICANTE RETROACTIVE RESEARCH

The capacity of Architecture to challenge and extend the limits of other disciplines:

Keywords:

DAY 3

THE SHELL: AM (De)stabilising History: Event as an Operative Tool of Power and Transgression in Belgrade Nikolina Bobic, University of Plymouth, United Kingdom

KEYNOTE CONTEXT-ARCHITECTURE AND THE GENIUS OF PLACE Eric Parry Eric Parry Architects, UK The physical framework for social interaction, more elegantly termed ‘communicative space’, is a haptic and material reality established through time, place and by design. The challenge for architects and urban planners is that the task of the design of public space, lying beyond the definition of the autonomous object or the formal properties of surface, requires responses of a particular and complex nature. In this contribution to the 14th Architectural Humanities Research Association conference I will put forward a framework for spatial, material and social thinking that can assist in the ordering of design approaches.

I have separated the discussion into two parts: the vertical and the horizontal. In the first I will focus on the dialogue between ground and horizon. The pavement embodies both the everyday and seemingly mundane rituals of life, but has also led to some of the most sophisticated representations of cosmological order.

On the other hand the horizon poses a fascinating philosophical conundrum; it cannot be removed and yet it cannot be reached. The horizon cuts across the spatial distinction between inside and outside, in the horizon exteriority merges with interiority. The ground – horizon dichotomy I have termed the vertical.

The horizontal concerns the definition of public space through the urban archetypes of street and square. In this second part I will examine the two interrelated ideas of layering and simultaneity. Simultaneity is the cumulative effect of related parts to a spatial configuration. It can be applied to the widest possible range of scales, from a picture to the city. Architecturally the framework within which we can begin to appreciate the simultaneity of parts is most usefully understood through the notion of typical situations. Layering is a term used more broadly than the formal and physical characteristics of façade.

I use it here to suggest the sectional adjacencies of spaces, the cumulative kinetic quality of spaces together with the character of façade in relation to context.

I will be using historical precedents, together with current projects to illustrate the ideas outlined.

This paper addresses event both as a tool of control and suppression, and as a tool of difference, transgression and opening up of history. Making difference operational is a political tool of transgression and one that this paper explores by engaging with two specific time periods of Belgrade’s political history; from an alternative practice of socialism and NAM, to the period after NATO’s 1999 targeting. More specifically, by mapping history in relation to an actual event occurring at that time is to address the necessity for events to operate outside the frame of dominant power, and (in)directly prefigure an alternative conception of history to the dominant one. The interest being on articulating a belief, an event of transgression in itself, that alternatives do exist at a time of present-continuous control associated in this paper with ordering of values, Serbia’s contractual operations with NATO, lack of transparency to do with urban development, as well as commercialisation and privatisation. ____________________________________

Red Carnivals: The Rebellious Body of Architectural Pedagogy Igor Marjanović, Washington University in St. Louis, United States of America; Katerina Rüedi Ray, Bowling Green State University, United States of America In looking at architectural pedagogy as a rebellious body and architecture school as a performative and playful space, this paper examines carnivalesque activities in two rural venues in Central and Eastern Europe between 1969 and 1990: the Czech architectural commune “Školka” and the Serbian Village School for the Philosophy of Architecture. It tells the story of the internationalization and fragmentation of modernist ideology, and of the role of the carnivalesque in forming not only the individual architect but also the disciplinary body of architecture. After the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Školka, an outpost of the independent architectural practice Sial, emerged in an abandoned inn on the rural outskirts of the city of Liberec. Its informal educational model developed far from the surveillance of the hardline communist regime and integrated play and humor with architectural influences of the 1960s, including high-tech and pop culture.

Further south, a charismatic teacher and architect Bogdan Bogdanović abandoned his teaching post at the University of Belgrade—after a failed attempt to reform its School of Architecture—opening in Mali Popović the Village School for the Philosophy of Architecture. Repurposing an abandoned elementary school building, Bogdanović replaced curriculum with lectures, workshops and performances

where actors often exchanged roles with its audience. Ultimately, these performative pedagogies recalled Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival—namely free interaction, eccentric behavior, méssaliances, and sacrilege—embracing and transforming the bodies of students and faculty alike. These schools also embraced their rural contexts and medieval folk traditions, defying common assumptions that both festivals and cultural production are confined to urban centers. Acting as dialectical agencies of both ideological compliance and resistance, these embodiments transcended their immediate teaching purposes and led to larger cultural aspirations, projecting the school into the world and the city into the countryside. ____________________________________

The paper hypothesises that Tahrir Square is constituted by absences and negations; it has no dominating institution or building, no commanding rostrum and no unifying geometric order. Proximate but not adjacent to crucial political institutions, Tahrir Square effectively exerts political pressure within extant configurational arrangements – but phenomenologically acts on its occupiers like a formless extension untethered to its immediate surroundings. It simulates the horizontal extensions and open horizons of French revolutionary sites. It presents a malleable slate onto which myths and countermyths (e.g. Islamicist) maybe projected; it obscures differences in a society that underestimates its heterogeneity. ____________________________________

Tahrir Square’s Festive Imagination

Festa della Chinea: Tradition and The ‘Exotic’ in Roman Festival Design

Hazem Ziada, University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom

Nicholas Temple, University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom

Since the late 1960s, Egyptians have repeatedly gravitated to Tahrir Square to stage political actions. The 18-day occupation of January-February 2011 and subsequent two years of robust actions represent the longest stretch of continuous sit-ins and recurrent happenings, and hence the closest to developing a quasi-consistent festive form.

This paper explores how Tahrir Square’s spatial morphology and experience scaffold its form(s) of festive activities, festive social formations and festive imagination.

The Festa della Chinea, which roughly translates as ‘Festival of the Wondering Nag’, was a historic festival held in Rome each year until the late 18th century (1788), in which the viceroy of the Kingdom of Naples was required to pay his homage to the pope. This entailed, among other things, the offering of a white horse (‘nag’) that formed part of a procession through the streets of Rome. The destination of the procession was the Basilica of St Peters, where the horse was traditionally allowed to wonder within the basilica before finally being guided to the cathedra of the pontiff for a formal blessing. The peculiarity of this festival has never really been properly explained. By the early 18th century it gave rise to the most elaborate ephemeral constructions in the city, culminating in a huge firework display in the Piazza Farnese, the location of the embassy of the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples and Sicily from the late 17th century. In this paper, I will examine the Festa della Chinea in the context of the tradition of festivals in Rome, tracing changes in the symbolic and ceremonial meanings of these extravagant events with specific focus on equine symbolism. As one of the oldest festivals in Rome, which was held annually over a period of about 600 years, the Festa della Chinea provides a rich source of material about how such events were celebrated and understood, both by the organisers and the spectators.

Aborted before congealing into their own, Tahrir Square’s fledgling festival forms remain tentative: Some features linger from traditional moulid celebrations (dedicated to saint-like awliya’) with folkreligion associations which recall Mikhail Bakhtin’s arguments about carnival’s subversive nature. Simultaneously, Tahrir Square’s actions draw heavily on post-enlightenment modes of festivities whose lineage trace back to early French Revolutionary festivals, through early Soviet Revolution’s mass festivals, and to post-1960s Protestivals like Seattle 1999. Accordingly, tensions characterise Tahrir’s fetes: sacred vs. secular tendencies; populist vs. intellectualist inclinations along class fault-lines; and spatially: multi-centered vs. centralised, spontaneous vs. ritualised.

If festival is a generator of myth, while ritual reifies existing myth, what mythology do Tahrir’s political fetes generate or reshape? The paper investigates if Tahrir’s protestival evokes myths of an idealised, unified society (following Durkheim), and explores how Tahrir’s space scaffolds this myth’s imagination. It approaches these inquiries through mining Egyptian literary fiction on Tahrir Square for insightful formulations of its social myths, along with examining accounts of the square’s events since the 1960s in newspapers, photography and video. Additionally, it traces the square’s morphological developments through analysing historical maps.

ROOM P440: AM Sexual Acts and Performativity in Public Spheres Dundjerovic / Martínez Sánchez, Birmingham City University, United Kingdom

In this paper, we address the perception of sexual activities in public spaces and how they become aesthetic, social and cultural intervention once expressed through and embodied within performative events (theatre, street performance, carnival, festival, rave etc). A substantial amount of research has been done on the relation between sexuality and gender about public spaces, and influence of civic and urban identity on public expression of sexuality and gender. We will look at the invented rituals establishing sexuality within a context of performativity through relationships with public spaces. As the case studies, we will use the works of theatre companies La Fura dels Baus and Teatro Oficina. To set up the set of relationships between inside and outside, we will borrow a useful concept on ‘spheres’ from the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk to look at the public space as a system of spheres where a different set of rules apply enabling actions to take place. These performances in urban contexts, as well as some festivals and particularly carnivals, become a way of the staging of sexual acts in public space, in opposition to the dominant narrative of private – domestic space.

We will look at how collectiveness and civic spaces become essential elements of this phenomenon and its relevance in our contemporary reality as an element of subversion of social structures. We will also examine performative events where sexual acts as a language of human relationship in public spaces bringing intimacy. ____________________________________

Summertime. Times and Cultures of Coexistence in The Public Spaces Federica Fava, Independent Researcher, Italy The paper presents the case study Estate Romana (Roman Summer), an initiative promoted between 1977 and 1985 by Rome’s City councilor for culture Renato Nicolini. Starting from the alternative reuse of archaeological sites, decayed places and abandoned territories, through the interaction with cinema, dance, theater and poetry performances, the events of the Estate Romana are

elements of an “immaterial urbanism” which revived the economic and overall destiny of the Italian capital. In facing a historical period characterized by great social and political crisis, the rediscovery of ephemeral practices introduced urban governance tools particularly aimed at rebuilding spaces for collective life, which had been lost in the uncertainty of the Anni di piombo, the years of Italian terrorism. Based on the idea of removing boundaries between high and low culture, the installations of the Estate Romana became modes of dialogue between reality and the theoretical and practical dimension of architecture, opening up new physical and conceptual perspectives. In the exceptional state of celebrations, new places and communities had been tested, encouraging everybody to participate in their city life.

Beyond historical reconstruction, in this paper experiences as the International Festival of Poets or the open-air cinema at Maxentius Basilica are illustrated in the relations they engage with historical and metropolitan landscapes, people and urban politics. In its 40th anniversary, while the Italian National Museum of Arts MAXXI is organizing celebrations, this work traces a bridge between the meaning of “the art of wonder”, the contradictions that led to the decay of the original principles and the memories it has left until the present day.

By recounting this season, the aim of the paper is to investigate the ability of festival architectures, or non-architectures, to shape the city, rediscovering the extant heritage not only in cultural terms but also in its innovative values. ____________________________________

Festival, Ritual, and Rhetoric of The Arabian Market Street Jasmine Shahin, De Montfort University, United Kingdom The proposed paper aims at investigating the role of the festival in shaping and developing some socially manufactured meanings that are adhered to the rituals of the Arabian market street experience.

Accordingly, it shall be argued that Arabian market street festivals are far from being a chaotic set of events, portraying a plethora of accumulated prejudices and cultural objects that tie the Arabian people to their urban space, on social, religious and political levels. Based on the phenomenological hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer, the paper will further argue that the recurrence of the festival allows not only the physical immersion of the individual flâneur into the event, but also positions him within an evolving socio-urban discourse and re-asserts his belonging to a larger community of meaning. According to Gadamer, rituals constitute the totality of our acting, thinking, and speaking, embodying, as such, a community’s mutually binding agreements in terms of morals and customs. In other words, rituals, whether in religious, national, or social festivals, remind us that we belong to something ‘larger than oneself,’ and that our role in this experience is not one of mere observation but is intrinsically

one of sharing and participation. Through the temporal experience of the festival, the urban space presents itself as a physical stage of events and as a mental embodiment of society’s shared values.

Based on this proposition, the paper will cross-examine several cultural artifacts, such as architectural elements, PreIslamic poetry, contemporary literature and media productions, that would assist in identifying a ‘texture of reciprocal events’ that led to the development of the Arabian market street’s urban/ architectural setting in conjunction with communal rituals and festive events. In other words, the paper will aim to uncover the methods through which the festival once allowed the development of a genuine socio-urban discourse, and in the consolidation of people’s conception of self and of their respective communities within the boundaries of a specific spatial and temporal space. ____________________________________

This Is Not A Festival: A Tale Of Three Cities Jon Goodbun, Royal College of Arts, United Kingdom “When bohemians gather, they tend to form ‘scenes’ — loosely knit societies that often coalesce around a meeting place; a salon, a club, a neighborhood or bar. Burning Man emerged from just this sort of boho scene in San Francisco. Such scenes have given rise to avant-garde and countercultural movements that have profoundly influenced the evolution of modern society. However, just as frequently, the interactive and communal aspect of these scenes has proven fragile and short-lived.

Seen against this background, Burning Man may claim one novelty: it is the first bohemian scene to turn itself into a city.”

- Larry Harvey - Blog Post - Welcome to Metropol – The Story of a City The growth in number and popularity of festivals today is a striking phenomena. These temporary autonomous zones manifest contradictory drives: often providing a space for genuine social, cultural, personal and political experimentation that can have a genuinely critical and revolutionary edge, yet also simultaneously providing a false release from the stresses of precarious capitalism, an intensification of spectacle consumption, and ultimately returning a docile workforce back to production.

Perhaps for these reasons,Burning Man, as I was told on my first visit to Black Rock City, is not a festival. In this paper I will argue that in order to understand the phenomena of Burning Man we need to understand it in relation to three cities: San Fransisco, Las Vegas and of course, Black Rock City: the city that the Burning Man organisation builds on an annual basis on the desert playa of Nevada, and which each year claims to disappear again leaving no trace. Burning Man has its roots in a number of Situationist inspired San Fransisco Bay Area artist groups, but to really understand the organisation we need to see its relation to Las Vegas, and understand the community’s coemergence with Silicon Valley out of the legacies of the Bay Area counterculture, and its on-going relations with

the Palo Alto community. Drawing upon my experiences of ‘coming home’ to Black Rock City a few times, such an understand both draws upon and critiques Californian Ideology. ____________________________________

ROOM P441: AM From Multi-Ethnic Space to Fantasy Land: Augmented Urbanity at The Transyl vania International Film Festival and the Untold Festival in Cluj-Napoca Katalin Tánczos, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania Cluj is the largest university city in Transylvania (Romania) with a historically, sociologically rich background, it is one of the most dynamically developing cities in the region, and it is the venue for a variety of local and international festivals. The Transylvania International Film Festival (TIFF) and the Untold Festival are the most significant ones that generate the most international and national publicity, although they are different in their attitudes towards local culture and the existing context of the city. TIFF promotes local filmmakers and international cinema, it presents a particular sensitivity to the urban fabric of Cluj saturated with cultural significance, multi-ethnic history, thus its historical venues become attractions as an integrated part of the festival itself. The festival places movie screenings in thought-provoking locations and permeates the public spaces of the city on a variety of different levels.

Untold is an international entertainment music festival that superimposes its ephemeral architectural structures upon the existing urban context of the city and creates fantasy narratives about Cluj that are displayed in a variety of mediums during the festival. The city is reimagined as a theme park subordinated to the consumption of the festival itself. Both festivals represent a fertile ground of investigation of the diverse use of audiovisual media during these events. The subject of investigation is the augmented reality created by the intersection of media and architecture. The two festivals present opposing attitudes towards the city: the TIFF creates experimental, cultural experiences in close relationship with the built environment; the Untold Festival refashions the city regardless of the existing context. The paper investigates from the perspective of architectural theory, media studies and post-phenomenological philosophy the way these festivals use different media in relation to urban space. It investigates the mutual contextualization of media and space, the way media constitute a dispositif for the interpretation of the city and become part of the architectural apparatus, it explores the boundaries between the physical and virtual dimensions of space.

Funeral As Festival: Celebrations For Life in Mosuo Tribe in China Huichao Feng, Birmingham City University, United Kingdom This paper reviews the process of the funeral ceremony of Mosuo of Southwest China as a festival event where the vernacular architectural settings have evolved for both ritual and everyday activities. As a matriarchal society, the role of women and men in ceremony is discussed. The article looks at the religious perception of death in Mosuo culture, which considers funerals as celebrations of the completion of a life cycle. The whole life cycle, including birth, growing up and death, is represented by different rituals and celebrating events in the funeral. The study used a participatory observation method to understand the process of Mosuo funeral. The process was interpreted using several festival theories (e.g. Falassi, 1987), which attempts to provoke a discussion on the definition and nature of festivals. ____________________________________

Festivals in Old Streets in Two Chinese Cities Yun Gao; Nicholas Temple; Yan Li; University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom Situated amidst the contemporary skyscrapers of many Chinese cities today, commercial streets have emerged in traditional Chinese styles that serve as places to host festive celebrations and to satisfy everyday leisure and commercial needs. Buildings that are situated along these streets operate at one level as ritual ‘encasements’ that frame the festival processions, and thereby ‘speak’ of ceremonial meanings.

As such, these framing devices constitute material remnants of past festival events periodically re-activated as public spectacles or during momentary episodes of individual/collective recollection. This study explores themes relating to these intersections between building and festive occasion through an examination of two traditionally designed commercial streets in China. One is Water Street in Yancheng, a newly constructed ‘Old Street’ in traditional Hui building styles located on the east coast of China. The other is Old Street in Kunming City in southwest China, a street built during Ming and Qing dynasties and renovated over a sustained period during the past ten years. These two streets convey very different ideas about representing (and re-enacting) history in architectural settings. The former could be said to constitute a unified language of traditional materials and technologies that expresses traditional ideologies and principles. The latter, on the other hand, comprises a mixture of contemporary and historical architectural craftsmanship (juxtaposing traditional and modern forms, materials and ornaments) that are consciously intended to communicate connections between past and present.

The study argues that architecture in these two cases presents in different ways

a ‘foregrounding’ of festivals, in which participants are reminded of previous events. Accordingly, architectural elements and their details serve as substitutes to words, in the way they re-capitulate the verbal and gestural meanings of festivals through design language. ____________________________________

Environmental Theatre as a Catalyst for Re-constructing a City’s Collective Memories: The Festival Performance ‘Revealing the Old Town’ as an Example Ching-pin Tseng, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan; Shu-fang Huang, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan Within the process of a city’s development, historical areas or boundaries might be changed or demolished by new constructions and political powers. Local people’s collective memories of the city would thus be erased. In order to recall people’s identification with local places, the paper would ask what means can be used for people to recollect their memories of the city. Could the reconstruction of architectural and environmental elements be associated with social events or contemporary festivals for the narration of the city’s stories? From the viewpoint that contemporary festivals are composed of a series of ceremonial or artistic performances demonstrated in multiple urban fabrics and related places, it might be important to reidentify the role of environmental theatre and the relationship between festival performances and spatial settings.

By introducing the historical background and the important cultural heritage of Kaohsiung’s old town, this paper will discuss the role of the festival performance - ‘Revealing the Old Town’ shown in Kaohsiung, Taiwan 2016, in relation to the cultural formation of the modern city. After the study of the relationship between local religious festivals and existing urban context, it can be essential to explore the potential of this environmental theatre for the constitution of people’s identification with the multiple societies and various cultures. Moreover, in association with existing cultural heritage and temporary spatial settings, this festival intends to stimulate a project of ‘The Regeneration of Old Fengshan (鳳 山) Town’ by using modern technology to rebuild and re-connect those historical relics. For the narration of the city’s historical happenings and the people’s collective memories, this paper would finally ask what sort of appropriate way of preserving the cultural heritage of this old town could be. In so doing, could multiple and contingent environmental theatres contribute to the substance of the city’s contemporary spatial formation and its cultural fabrics?

Urban Fabric: Maria Lai at Ulassai, Sardinia 1981 David Chandler, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom At Ulassai in eastern central Sardinia, a work of performance art staged by Maria Lai (d.2013) has received attention for her festive response to the challenges of regeneration and social identity in an isolated mountain town that had been losing population to emigration in the wake of post war neglect and the forces of nature. In 1979, the Sardinian sculptor replied to the municipal request for a design for a war memorial with a counter proposal for a ‘Monument to the Living by the Living’’. This led to an experimental 1981 community project whereby the small terraced town might tie itself (legarsi) to its mountain summit by weaving all the houses together along most of the streets: a blue ribbon of fabric (tela Maria) re-enacting a local legend with gender symbolism. The street ribbon ties were coded with symbolic meanings arrived at through citizen consensus. The art performance would run concurrently with the Festa della Madonna held annually.

Maria Lai developed a hybrid conflation of the traditional religious procession and a re-imagined urban performance art event that would turn the town into a colossal loom; employing the residents as human shuttles. This paper revisits the route of the events of the parallel festivals and the significance of the threaded mountain with reference to new archive resources, a 1981 super-8 cine film record and a recent two volume documentary photographic survey of Ulassai compiled from residents’ photographs. Such was the extent of the impact of the festival event that in 2012 Global Health Promotion Research identified unexpected and far-reaching benefits accrued by Ulassai as selfconfidence and citizen empowerment brought prosperity to the region. Several cities have referenced variants of the 1981 Maria Lai festival format, as contexts evolve. ____________________________________

THE SHELL: PM Pruning and Propagating Civic Behaviour: Three Feste in and Around Santa Maria Della Vittoria In Mantua, 1495-97 Susan Janet May, Birmingham City University, United Kingdom The Gonzaga of Mantua, in common with other ruling houses, were accustomed to utilizing the occasions of religious feasts to promote social cohesion, civic pride and dynastic loyalty. This paper examines three such festive celebrations, to show how the Marquis of Mantua, Francesco II, and his court advisors could turn them to Gonzaga advantage. Each year on the Feast of the Ascension, the population of Mantua was swollen with pilgrims drawn to the city to venerate the relic

of the Most Precious Blood of Christ held in the church of Sant’Andrea. The processional route passed by the house of a Jew, lying somewhat apart from the city’s Jewish ghetto. With permission, the Jew had removed from its exterior a fresco of the Virgin, Christchild and saints. During the vigil of Ascension Day 1495, stirred by anti-Jewish sentiment, the processing crowd erupted into a riot in which the Jew’s house was vandalised.

To compensate for the removal of the holy image, despite his having secured prior consent, the unfortunate Jew was made to pay the expenses of having a new painting made, the Madonna della Vittoria

by Andrea Mantegna, today displayed in the Louvre. The painting was a votive altarpiece, to give thanks to the Virgin for having saved the marquis in battle and his victory at Fornovo on 6 July 1495. On the twelve-month anniversary of the battle, a lavish commemoration was organised, whereby the finished canvas was solemnly processed through the streets of Mantua from Mantegna’s house to Santa Maria della Vittoria, a chiesetta hurriedly erected to receive the painting on the site of the expunged fresco. A sermon was preached in front of the altarpiece on the street outside, the portrait of Francesco allegedly moving everyone to tears. The following year, in 1497, Francesco brought forward by four days the commemoration of his victory to coincide with the Feast of the Visitation, thus grafting his temporal triumph onto an assured, sacred ritual, to be annually inscribed in the city’s fabric. ____________________________________

The Potential Impact of The Newroz Ritual on The Historic City Centre of Erbil Farah W. Al-Hashimi, Independent researcher, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom A city is a phenomenon associated with particularities of a culture, beliefs and events. Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.

Its historic centre - standing at the bottom of the south side of the city’s citadel hill - has experienced many changes over the centuries, and is currently, together with the citadel undergoing a process of conservation development.

This paper focuses on the concept of a productive space. It places emphasis on the importance of celebrating Newroz, the annual and ancient Kurdish festival, in the public square of the historic centre of Erbil - that needs to be re-activated - as opposed to its current venue in the newly created Shanidar Park, located far from the old city. A qualitative interdisciplinary approach involving history, architecture and socioculture, has been chosen.

Interpretation and descriptive analytical methods are used to analyse the impact of Newroz on the vibrancy of the space. The findings show that the return of this day of celebration to its former location would strengthen the connection of that area to its past and increase the attachment of the local people to their city, in addition to having positive economic impact on the area.

Post-Colonial Legacies in Seville: Traces of the Ibero American Exhibition, 1929 Ana Souto, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom

The Ibero-American Exhibition (IAE), celebrated in Seville in 1929, differs from other International exhibitions in several aspects: The IAE was not international, but only Spanish and Latin American in content (even though Brazil and the US also participated with pavilions); the IAE was designed to showcase the post-colonial Spanish and Latin American cultural context, rather than an overview of industrial and colonial representations, as it had been done in most International Exhibitions and World Fairs; and finally, most of the pavilions and urban landscapes were designed as permanent features of the city of Seville, instead of the temporary pavilions which were more popular in other international expositions. As a result, the IAE could be interpreted as a “Third Space”, were new representations and narratives around national and post-colonial narratives were questioned and challenged. This paper will use Homi Bhabha’s theories (1994) in order to analyse the IAE in its context: first, examining its particular post/neo-colonial condition, since even though all former Spanish colonies attended as independent republics, there are so many elements that highlight a neo-imperialist narrative and relationship (such as the architectural styles, parades, posters, etc.). Second, the Colonial Exhibition of Paris, 1931, will serve as a comparative case study, another international exhibition produced within the “long nineteenth century” (Terdiman, 1993), where colonial and national identity issues were represented and re-imagined (Morton, 1998). ____________________________________

ROOM P440: PM The Calcio Storico in Florence: Agonistic Ritual as Civic Order Christian Frost, Birmingham City University, United Kingdom This paper will describe the emergence and evolution of the Calcio Storico football match in Florence as a manifestation of the festive order of the city in relation to the various architectural settings that have accommodated it. Although many people have heard of Siena’s famous horse race, the Palio, and will pay large sums to witness the less than two minute race, fewer people are aware of Florence’s equivalent event, also structured around a competition between the historic districts of the city; the Calcio Storico.

Both events have a long and significant history bound up with the forms of urban communal governance that initially emerged following the retreat of German Imperial power in the thirteenth century.

Given that this retreat of feudal power created opportunities for self-rule, one would have expected that manifestations

of Florence’s new institutions would be cooperative, constructive and harmonious.

However, the city’s elites, often armed with a strong sense of their own independence associated to mercantile success, also adopted rituals that revealed the conflict, violence and disorder that remained at the heart of their new, partially democratic, agonistic institutions. Although over time the rituals, parades, markets and games associated with the overall festival have adapted to reflect the representational requirements necessary for each particular period, many aspects of the festival have remained constant.

Consequently, an event such as the Calcio Storico that still retains much of its original iconography is an important reference point for understanding both the idea of festival in Florence as well as, more broadly, the relationships that exist between festival, architecture and civic order. ____________________________________

The Situational Scenography of The Surrealist City: De Chirico and Breton Dagmar Motycka Weston, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom The paper is rooted in the key role which urban theatre, understood in its broad sense, has traditionally played in the culture of the European city and in the architectural configurations of its public realm. The argument will be that from the earliest cities, there has been a reciprocal relationship between urban events (festivals, ritual, processions, ceremonies of political power, public entertainments etc.) and the settings in which they were staged. This was a shared priority in the making of the city. Thus informed by situational, scenographic considerations, urban architecture was able to fulfill an ethical function. This will be illustrated by a brief discussion of selected historical precedents and developments, including perspective. The main focus of the paper will be the Surrealist efforts in the early decades of the twentieth century to subvert the prevailing perspectival, rationalist sensibility by the development of different kinds of corporeal spatiality, and by interpreting the city as the essential theatre of the daily merveilleux, fully engaging the imagination. In the Metaphysical painting of Giorgio De Chirico, the Italian city is portrayed as a mysterious, moody dream world. The deep, silent piazzas, non-naturalistic lighting, raked floors and flat scenery constitute highly theatrical settings. In such intense atmosphere, an enigmatic presence or event might materialize at any moment.

The Surrealist urban texts and poems see the city of Paris as a theatre of mysterious encounter, modern myth, and weird coincidences. In the Night of the Sunflower chapter of André Breton’s text, Amour Fou, the city becomes a non-perspectival psychic terrain, where the poet meets and is guided through a marvellous urban topography by the beautiful Jacqueline.

The text contains allusions to the themes of royal entry, labyrinth, alchemy, symbolic archetypes and ultimately, regeneration.

The paper will conclude with some

reflections on the current situation, and on what might constitute a meaningful public realm today. ____________________________________

ROOM P441: PM FAB FEST: The Fabrication and Exploration of a Pop-up City David Scott; Krista Zvirgzda; Matas Olendra, University of Westminster, United Kingdom The paper explores FAB FEST, a new International Fabrication Festival held at the University of Westminster. FAB FEST combines creative architectural design with innovative digital fabrication using lightweight, recyclable materials. Teams of five or more students worked together with a mentor from academia or professional practice and over a four-month period designed and built habitable pavilions.

The brief was to contribute to the creation of a ‘Pop-up City’, constructed during the first part of the festival, and enjoyed in a series of musical, making and other events in the final weekend. The project was a collaboration between students from the host university as well as from universities around the world, working with a diverse array of architectural offices, industrial sponsors, and parts of the local community including schools and businesses. FAB FEST takes place in the centre of a great City and participants engaged with a selection of its attractions in events through the week. It also however explores ideas about the city directly, and how they might be transformed through participants’ designs for what they imagine the Cities of tomorrow to be. Also of particular value is the international nature of the festival encouraging the blending and exchange of ideas between creative young people from very different cultures. The transient urban space that was produced then became a site in which to interact with the local community, who were brought into the festival through joint projects instigated in the months building up to the event.The results of the project are discussed as evidenced in the pavilion designs and in the participant and visitor responses. T he events were documented through video and still images as well as interviews with participants at all levels, and with festival attendees. The project produced a remarkable range and diversity of work, offering innovative forms and approaches to design and making, as well as creative responses to the idea of the city. The paper concludes with a discussion about the unique form of public engagement offered by FAB FEST and how it might generalise to other types of event. ____________________________________

The Sound of Spectacle: Xenakis at The Montreal World’s Fair Ruth Bernatek, UCL, United Kingdom In the summer of 1966, the architect and composer Iannis Xenakis received an

invitation to create an original piece of music for the French Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal world’s fair. Rather than comply with the outlined brief, he responded with a daring proposal to install an immense audio-visual spectacle of sound and light in the central void of the building. Xenakis believed that his installation would give the French Pavilion ‘an exceptional and unique artistic appeal’, defining the era by using the ‘most advanced technical and audio-visual means currently available’ [1].

Not only did this correspond with the goals of the French exhibition and the ethos of Expo, which took Terres des Hommes/Man and his World as its theme, and located science at the centre of human activity and productivity. It also gave Xenakis an opportunity to realize his initial ideas for a total electronic synthesis of light and sound, consolidating his artistic preoccupations in the years since his involvement in the earlier Philips Pavilion in 1958. Drawing upon recent archival and field research conducted at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, this paper argues that Xenakis’ unique conception of sound and space in the Polytope Montreal indicates a move toward a new typology of audio-visual architecture that emerges after the war and coincides with developments in sound technology.

Furthermore, I question to what extent Xenakis’ audio-visual architectures are only achievable under the aegis of high profile international exhibitions. The Montreal project was the first in a series of five realized ‘polytopes’ by Xenakis, which were performed in Canada, France, Iran and Greece. This paper aims to determine the wider relevance of Xenakis’ audiovisual works as a subject of study for architecture today, and address pertinent questions about how the soundscapes of spectacle may potentially contribute to architectural history.

[1] [IX (OM) 25-5] See also, Iannis Xenakis, ‘Proposition for the French Pavilion at the World’s Fair’ (1966), in Music and Architecture: Architectural Projects, Texts and Realizations, ed. & trans. by Sharan Kanach (New York: Pendragon Press, 2008) pp. 208-09 (p. 208). ____________________________________

Performative Architectures Between Theory and Practice Helen Stratford, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom Architecture requires movement and interaction with the body to be understood.

In this tacit inter-relationship, buildings and public space are better understood as “performative conditions” – “acting on us and activated by us.”1 Bringing together concepts of performativity from visual/ live-art, critical theory and performance studies, this paper aims to foreground spatial knowledge accumulated through embodied/tacit forms, exploring how performative methodologies can be used as a tool to rethink place asking, what can such performative research bring to the understanding and production of architecture and urban politics in public space? In visual/live-art, growing numbers of people and groups are working between concepts of art, architecture and

Jo Hassall, Liz Stirling, Leeds Beckett University, United Kingdom

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Conference Exhibition Curator: Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez Exhibition Assistants: Huichao Feng & Jenny Peevers Chair of The Conference Committee: Christian Frost Host Organization: Cultural Context Research Group, Birmingham School of Architecture and Design, Birmingham City University

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Conference Coordinator: Jieling Xiao Newspaper Design: Tom Tebby

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F= is a feminist research cluster based at Leeds Beckett University. We believe in the power of art and design as a platform for social change. We celebrate, debate, question, listen and make together and invite others to join us. For four years we have celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8th with a walk through the city centre, the ritualistic burning of a large

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Women, Visibility and Playful Acts. Annual Walk and Burning Ritual celebrating International Women’s Day in Leeds, UK

symbolic object followed by performances, exhibition and conference in the City of Leeds public library. We create these public events with graphic art and design students and in collaboration with community groups and local organisations.

For the students this is often the first time they have participated in a more politicised public event and they learn that self-organisation is a powerful tool for individual and collective expression and action. This is an important learning space. These collective acts are designed to disrupt the individualistic, consumerdriven culture that dominates the city and create a safe platform for diverse voices around gender and equality to be expressed. The performative, embodied experience of the live moving event is essential; we physically inhabit our public space, we feel camaraderie, and surprising unforeseen things happen in the streets that create meaning for us as humans.

Here we are able to interact playfully with passers by, have debate and explore how the use of spectacle, humour and celebration can facilitate a visible space for other voices to be heard. To have a voice means “the right to self-determination, to participation, to consent or dissent; to live and participate, to interpret and narrate.” (Rebecca Solnit). We are inspired by the activist and feminist art history of Leeds, and its resilient DIY and grass roots communities. Reclaim The Night walks started in Leeds, and there is a wide community of feminist networks committed to equality and women’s health and well being. ____________________________________

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performance. In art practice the term ‘performative research’ to describe practice as research processes is well known. Simultaneously, within architectural practice and theory, the idea of the performative has become prevalent, however, the term is still largely conflated with performance, creating spaces for performance, or material technologies rather than a “site of group co-ordination in space over time.” I am a practice led researcher researching performative methodologies through active research and performance-based events. Focusing on concepts from performance studies, one example from my research practice and informed by the “situated knowledge’s” of Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, this paper will explore what is at stake when substantiating performative approaches in the context of ‘quantifiable’ forms of spatial knowledge production.4 Exploring critiques around the iterative and citational production of subjectivities in relation to “intra-action”5 and multimodal embodied praxis in relation to nonrepresentational methodologies,6 it will explore to what degree different groups who inhabit cities and public spaces through performative actions and events produce new ways of knowing and further, what potential these performative practices, situated in everyday politics, have for alternate models of practicebased knowledge production in architecture practice and research. ____________________________________

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5 Glenn Howells Architects 321 Bradford Street, B5 6ET