Matters of Everyday Life and Death

Through strategies of surviving in crisis, experimentation within oppressive atmospheres, planning from below, reshaping domestic space-time, cutting with kitchen knives, or comprehending the personal as political, the everyday is not just a zone of normalisation, but also a site of active imagination, play and reinvention.

Nishat Awan is Professor of Architecture and Visual Culture at UCL Urban Laboratory. Her research and writing focus on diasporas, migration and border regimes. She is interested in modes of spatial representation, particularly in relation to the digital and the limits of witnessing as a form of ethical engagement with distant places. Nishat will screen and discuss her video essay Pahaar (mountains), within the context of a long-term research project on displacement. The film shifts across border landscapes and villages in Pakistan and Turkey, exploring the hopes and desires of those who make perilous journeys across hostile borders.

Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Sussex. His most recent books are Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late Twentieth Century Britain (2023) and Playgrounds, the Experimental Years (Reaktion, 2024). He is currently working on two book projects. One is on the painter Frank Bowling and the other is on the state and potential of the humanities at a moment of multiple global emergencies. Ben will be talking about spaces of anticipatory reparation in a range of examples including adventure playgrounds.

Sites & Situations explores physical territories, human and beyond-human communities and political contexts through contemporary art, design and architecture practice and interdisciplinary exchange.

RCA page: https://www.rca.ac.uk/research-innovation/projects/sites-situations/

S&S Insta. https://www.instagram.com/sites_and_situations?igsh=cGRtdDB4ZzBrZmV0