When people take to the streets together, they constitute a political body that is, in itself, a collective claim to rights. These occupations constitute everyday urban utopias that emerge from below: those that sprout from our streets, neighborhoods, territories, and ways of life. Those that are expressed without words through spontaneous appropriations of space, or take form in collective actions, in-situ pedagogies, free artistic and cultural expressions, claims, and protests. These utopias are unfinished, provisional, and sometimes even involuntary, yet they are also concrete and embedded in everyday life. They are often expressions of resistance, care, and hope in the face of the multiple forms of violence that traverse our lives and territories, while sustaining the social and ecological relationships that make those territories possible.
August 5: 11AM-1:30PM EST
August 12: 11AM-1:30PM EST
August 19: 11AM-1:30PM EST
August 26: 11AM-1:30PM EST
September 2: 11AM-1:30PM EST
September 9: 11AM-1:30PM EST
In this course, letters, understood as an open and expansive form of correspondence, will serve as the medium to bring everyday urban utopias into dialogue, examining the political relationships between bodies, objects, and space, and reveal the multiple layers of complexity—violence, invisible organizational structures, networks of care, among others—that underlie these occupations. But letters are also a method: a form of care, collective attention, listening, and expression among people who share the will to imagine and sustain other ways of inhabiting. Together, we will generate a collaborative archive of images, maps, questions, stories, and correspondences that accounts for these embodied, transcontextual, and plural utopias.
Letters from Urban Utopias: Frameworks and Inspirations
We will explore the meaning of urban utopia as a situated and shared construction. Together, we will exchange experiences, references, and imaginaries that inspire this collective exercise in correspondence. We will also introduce the collective archive and the epistolary dynamic that will accompany the course.
The Political Power of Bodies in Public Space
Through still and moving images, we will examine cases in which bodies, objects, and infrastructures gathered together transform space and give shape to new territorial scenographies of rights. Focusing on performative and ritual practices, we will explore repertoires of collective action and forms of occupying public space.
Utopias as Resistance to Violence
We will reflect on structural violence, territorial exclusion, and climate and social crises, examining how everyday urban utopias emerge as counter-narratives of rights and collective horizons of hope.
Crossed Reflections: Images, Diagrams, Contexts
We will deepen the exchange of letters initiated during the previous sessions, bringing visual materials together with poetic and speculative fragments to establish correspondences across participants, contexts, and experiences.
Territorial and Collective Networks
We will explore experiences of community organizing that sustain urban utopias through neighborhood, ecological, feminist, rural, youth, and artistic networks. We will reflect on social and cultural connectivity as a way of sustaining ecosystemic connectivity across fractured territories.
Archive of Collective Raw Reflections
In our final gathering, we will revisit the materials produced throughout the course to contribute to an archive of transcontextual urban utopias: a living constellation of texts, images, and connections across spaces, communities, and territories.
Arquitectura Expandida (AXP) is a Bogotá-based collective founded in 2010 that works at the intersection of art, architecture, urbanism, and collaboration with urban grassroots movements focused on the right to the city, understood as the right to occupy, transform, and enjoy the city. To this end, AXP develops tools for autonomy, urban negotiation, and experimental spatial governance, including self-construction, cartography, data visualization, and the photographic and audiovisual documentation of occupations, processes, and urban resistance to different forms of violence and exclusion. AXP is currently composed of Ana María López Ortego and Harold Guyaux. This workshop is developed in collaboration with Viviana Parada, a frequent collaborator of the collective.