The deadline for Interstice 21: Fixing is now extended to Monday, 12^th April.

See call for papers

https://interstices.ac.nz/index.php/Interstices/announcement/view/8

Fixing

Maintenance and care might be imagined to be conservative practices, aiming at stasis or keeping something going in the same track. Yet this underestimates the dynamic nature of fixing. To repair or sustain something is to become intimately entangled in processes of decay, ageing, entropy; but also, with growth, complexity and otherness, with fallow states, and with regeneration. To develop a fixation with something is to be turned implacably away from oneself. Rather than fixing in place, this issue of Interstices asks how we fix things together across and through places.

Donna Haraway contrasts poiēsis as “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before”—with sympoiēsis, a co-creation, a “making things together”. Designing space is necessarily sympoiētic, emerging from a complex collusion of the human and other-than-human. Accordingly, we are interested in shifting our view from individualised moments of creativity to bring into frame how space might be co-authored, negotiated through performances of maintenance and care. What are the spatial possibilities of this continuing dialogue between architecture and other domains? What is the agency of things beyond us? How might divergent scales—the scale of a virus say—jolt us to consider space differently?

We welcome contributions from architecture and art practice, philosophy, theory, ethnography, and geography, that speculate on questions of Fixing.  The intention is to capture a wide spectrum of disciplinary approaches and voices that chart the unanticipated directions and productive suturing of domains considering fixing, maintenance and care. Contributors are invited to submit papers, theoretical and critical reflections, and documentation of experimental creative works.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Spaces, sites, and practices of maintenance, care, and kaitiakitanga
• Indigenous models of co-creation such as papakāinga and talanoa
• Non-human agency: objects / animals / plants / AI / insects / viruses
• Decay, ageing, entropy
• Historical narratives of care
• Architectures of repair and maintenance
• Critiques of the Anthropocene/Chthulucene
• Creative practices configured by co-presence and co-authorship, such as drawing.

We invite you to submit a full paper inclusive of an abstract for the forthcoming Fixings issue of Interstices: Journal of Architecture & Related Arts.

Monday 12^th April March 2021:

Abstracts of 300-500 words are to be submitted to Sue Hedges susan.hedges@aut.ac.nz . Abstracts will be assessed by an academic panel comprising the issue editors and the Interstices executive editors.