Maria GIL ULLDEMOLINS
Universiteit Hasselt, Faculty of Architecture and Art, Graduate Student
- Kris Pintedit
Experimental poet and essayist Lisa Robertson (Toronto, 1961) has a singu-lar, lyrical approach to architecture and urbanism. Best known for Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2004), her writing never... more
Experimental poet and essayist Lisa Robertson (Toronto, 1961) has a singu-lar, lyrical approach to architecture and urbanism. Best known for Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2004), her writing never forgets the body of the dweller, nor the body of the city. In the much less studied, book-length poem Cinema of the Present (2014), Robertson offers a polyphonic voice that explores the relationship between these two bodies in ‘real time’:
66
Wherever you go, you will be a city.
The question for you becomes what are we doing with our bodies, why are we here?1
Robertson’s poem can be read as an account of urban encounters. The poem reveals how an ‘embodied community’ needs past traces to empathi-cally relate to the city, and to others. We will link this to French theorist Michel de Certeau’s concept of tactics, developed in The Practice of Every-day Life (1980), and the important role these traces play for Certeau as a resistance against spatial and cultural homogenization.
By bringing these two authors together, we want to explore ‘tactical’ and embodied writing about architecture – a topoanalysis of otherness and mnemonic intimacy, intensifying spatial experiences.
66
Wherever you go, you will be a city.
The question for you becomes what are we doing with our bodies, why are we here?1
Robertson’s poem can be read as an account of urban encounters. The poem reveals how an ‘embodied community’ needs past traces to empathi-cally relate to the city, and to others. We will link this to French theorist Michel de Certeau’s concept of tactics, developed in The Practice of Every-day Life (1980), and the important role these traces play for Certeau as a resistance against spatial and cultural homogenization.
By bringing these two authors together, we want to explore ‘tactical’ and embodied writing about architecture – a topoanalysis of otherness and mnemonic intimacy, intensifying spatial experiences.
