Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Workshops: 12 x 2 hours:
1.
who we are as
projects we are
inscribed, the body becomes the text that is written upon it. But
we also know that the body is the site for perceiving and knowing
the world, that its habitus (Bourdieu) and its ways of being-in-theworld (Heidegger/Merleau-Ponty) offer us embodied knowledge and
experience of the world.
As Eva Mahdalickova (2009) interprets Merleau-Ponty for us:
The experience of the body reveals an ambiguous mode of
existence. The body is a notion that holds a double meaning:
it can be viewed and understood as an object (when we say
avoir le corps - to have a body) and as a subject (when we
say tre son corps vcu - to be a living body). An experience
of the body should give us both at once. However, the
reflection of the body only gives us the thought of the body
and not the experience of it. Therefore, the two perspectives
on the body, the object and the subject, are separated when
the individual only thinks of his body. This is why we have to
put an emphasis on the experience. There is no other way to
know the body than to live it in the whole, as a subject and
object, as the one who is perceived and who perceives. " Je
suis donc mon corps "[4], I am my body, says Merleau-Ponty
and to live the body, it also is to live the space.
Readings (in advance):
Perez-Gomez,
Alberto
(1987),
Architecture
as
embodied
knowledge, Journal of Architectural Education 40, 2: 57-58.
Kennedy, Rosanne (2012), Humanitys footprint: reading Rings of
Saturn and Palestinian Walks in an Anthropocene era, Biography
35, 1: 170-189.
8.
Stuff, things, and bodies II: objects and touching the
world
In conceptualizing the idea of the social life of things Arjun
Appadurai (1986) opened up the possibilities of material culture as
a research site and as a research tool.
Objects contain/evoke/translate/transform memory:
they possess biographies:
they represent social class, ethnicity, religious affiliations :
they can be read, interpreted, analysed, represented
Readings (in advance):
Malkogeorgou, Titika (2011), Folding, stitching, turning: putting
conservation into perspective, Journal of Material Culture 16,4: 441455.
Sutton, David, and Michael Hernandez (2007),
Voices in the
kitchen: cooking tools as inalienable possessions, Oral History
35,2: 67-76.
9.