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Situated Practice foregrounds questions of site, situation, positionality and relationality to address the built and unbuilt environment. Through practice-led research, the programme supports the development of creative projects employing hybrid methods from art and architecture.
Through methods drawn from across art and architecture, urban activism and critical and creative writing, this fifteen-month Master’s guides students to become situated practitioners. With teaching that supports the development of critical awareness of spatial practices, audio and video production, site-writing and live interventions in public space, each student determines their site-related project through practice-led research. This culminates in a final work that might be a physical installation or a digital intervention, an audio or video work, a piece of critical writing, a participatory community project or a site-specific public performance.
The programme asks students to reflect upon their own positionality and navigate the agency of their responsibility and ethics of working with and for others in social and political contexts and across local and global scales. This careful attention is
manifested in their diverse responses, while also demonstrating the commonly held commitment to examining the ethical and political nature of working in public space.
This year the sites that inform the projects range across geographies and topics, cultures and languages. As part of the live interventions, students have been led on a mobile installation through a graffitied underpass, taken part in an insomniac’s sleep-in performance, and invited to imagine landscapes in a questionnaire. The cohort have seen paper cut-out shadow plays, witnessed the endangered craft of velvet flower making and understood the Chinese medicine cabinet as a point of cross-cultural encounter. In film, students have seen development and regeneration stories from China to the UK, a multiscreen film installation connecting deserts from Dhaka to Dungeness and site-specific animations drawing our attention to the agency of waste on the streets of Shoreditch. Participatory performances have engaged with colonial pasts and presents in collaborative sewing and talking circles, shared the oral histories of the Sheffield steel industry and fostered ecological sentience in a London park. Digital spatial reality has been interrogated with augmented reality, 3D-scanned sites have questioned and expanded known histories and we have been reminded of the materiality of digital infrastructure from Telegraph Street on the banks of the River Thames to a beach in Cornwall.
The programme would like to thank all the collaborators and visitors over the past year who have helped to develop the projects on show, and the students themselves for sharing the culmination of their situated practice.