Reimagining Approaches: Room 214
University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, School of Architecture
Featured Arctic Resistance: Welfare Colonialism and the Anti-Urban Counterculture View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Frederik Braüner
In the summer of 1977, hundreds of Greenlanders and Danes went ashore in the abandoned town Qullisaat, Greenland. Only five years prior, the city had been forcibly shut down by the Danish government as a part of the ongoing Concentration Policy. Over the summer of 1977, Qullisaat became the group’s temporary home as a revival of the Inuit tradition aasivik, best translated to ‘temporary summer settlement’. I want to argue that Aasivik 77, as the 1977 summer in Qullisaat came to be known, was not only a temporary spatial manifestation of a countercultural back-to-the-land utopia. In the particular case of Greenland, Aasivik 77 simultaneously represented an anti-colonial reclaiming and rediscovering of Inuit relation to nature, culture, and traditions. The event became a starting point for individuals to imagine and practice alternatives to Western capitalist consumer society, while providing a social and spatial alternative to the harmful welfare colonial policies of the Danish state. After an explanation of the historical context of Aasivik 77, focusing on the concentration policies implemented by the Danish state in the 1960s, I will analyze Aasivik 77 in order to show how this specific event became a spatialized anti-colonial manifestation and a re-entanglement of Greenlandic modernity into the natural environment. In a time where Greenland is continuing its struggle for independence, it is crucial to investigate how Inuit and the Greenlandic population resisted waves of Danish led colonial development. Highlighting this political agency shows the power of bottom-up activism that might even inspire future decolonial strategies.
Nascence of Presence: An Embodied Design Practice for Affective Communication in Architecture
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Weian Chen
This research asks how architecture could facilitate psychosomatic wellbeing through affective attunement between the physical environment and bodily action. It questions the notion of architecture as a conceptually objectified form isolated from its perceptual relationship with bodily behaviours, and it challenges the conventional design practice that generates formally dazzling but emotionally unfulfilling results. It aims to develop a theoretical framework for an embodied design practice to advance the knowledge between the advocation of atmospheric architecture and a detailed methodology to practice affective relations in architectural design. By advocating the neuro-psychological responsibility architecture has on our physio-psychological sensitivities, and the psychological impact architecture emanates to our body pre-reflectively, a phenomenological approach is taken to examine embodied cognition in neuroscience and perceptual analysis in movement psychology. The practice of states-shifting in Polyvagal Theory and the affective vocabulary summarized in the Kestenberg Movement Profile are integrated to form the common ground between perceptual phenomena and their autonomic implications. KMP's granularized description of affective states and its spatially related movement analysis affords the hypothesis of an intentionally designed architecture that affects neurological states. This enabled the theorization of an embodied architectural design practice, using affective language to describe architectural phenomena and their psychological, cognitive, and emotional correspondences. This embodied design framework offers an alternative to the conventional objectified design practice. It enables architecture to communicate non-verbal meanings consciously and opens up a therapeutic potential for architecture to take on the role of a co-regulator, enhancing the resilience of our autonomic nervous system.
Indigenous Peoples and the City: Reclaiming a Voice as a Politics of Resistance View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katia da Costa Bezerra
Environmental/economic policies, deforestation, fires, and invasions have contributed to the dispossession and killing of indigenous people in Brazil. The violence, however, is not restricted to the Amazon rainforest. The violence is also part of the everyday life of indigenous communities living in urban areas. Taking as a point of departure the documentary “This place is also mine” (2021), “Índios na cidade” (2013), and Daniel Munduruku’s works, this communication examines how the indigenous communities articulate their relationship with the city and their strategies to demand their rights. I argue that, by reaffirming their traditional roots and the relationship between individuals and nature, these communities demand their right to be seen as equals. In so doing, they re-create a sense of kinship that help position themselves as political actors.
