User:Mania/Personal Reader
Research questions
What do you want to investigate?
It's such a human thing to want to remember, discover, explore the unknown, and document, and I’m fascinated by sharing those subjective interpretations. Whether it’s through a workshop, a walk, or collective zine making, we can learn about aspects of culture, knowledge, or places not included in the dominant narrative. Collective practices can rename things and unlearn existing hierarchies. We can draw maps that tell hidden stories, showing reality from other perspectives. I'm fascinated by neighborhoods and eager to explore them as learning environments through playful methods.
I'm also inspired by a concept that a city can be read and I would like to investigate it more.
What are you trying to find out?
The focus on urban space as the space for various (un)learning practices, is strongly connected with my fascination.
During the third trimester, I engaged with a concept that an urban environment can be read, analyzed, and criticized as a text. Following this thought, if the city can be read it can also be annotated. Posters, graffiti, and performances in public squares serve as annotations carrying diverse comments. Those observations of public spaces made it very explicit who and what is not present and made me strongly interested in the emancipatory potential of cities and narratives that differentiate from the dominant norm.
How is something becoming a norm? And who decides on that? How people are expected to behave? In cities where those who are refusing are even furtherer left behind, I feel a strong need to experiment with various unlearning practices to activate different modes of knowing and being together.
What we take for granted is the result of all kinds of power structures, political decisions, planning processes, design choices, and advertisements contributing to the perfect image, where social problems are successfully hidden. I’m willing to actively practice to unlearn these mechanisms and embrace friction, encounter random chances, and actually talk to strangers. I am willing to unlearn together to intervene according to one’s own ideas and desires and leave our traces.
I'm interested in collective resistance against efficiency, consumption, and success at all costs. In cracks, seen as spaces collectively organized, shifting towards infrastructures for care, generosity, and attention rather than efficiency and perfection. Maybe a sense of humor and unlearning practices can help mobilize us collectively, embrace differences, and celebrate our individuality.
Therefore I see unlearning as a process that brings into question the norms but also questions how we learn and from whom.
- What tickles your curiosity in the topics you are currently investigating? I'm curious what can be done through text. This simple and raw aesthetics inspires me. I'm inspired by uncreative writing where words are shared, reused, recycled, stolen, quoted, duplicated, gifted, appropriated, mimicked…
What else tickles my curiosity:
- Language of subway maps
- Detourment
- Disinfographics
- Maps to get lost
- Graphic collages
- Text in space
- A spatial poem
- A three dimensional manifesto
- Ongoing search for cracks
- Residents unfullfilled dreams, or not yet fullfilled
- Scripted city; city constantly offering guidance and instructions, directions, prohibitions
- Dialogue between a city and a passer-by
- Children's drawings
- Chalk drawing on pavements
- Space for play
- Furniture left in public space