Abstract:
This paper explores a tactical practice that expands architecture away from building, addressing Rendell’s provocation that “architecture [. . .] continue[s] to be challenged by the idea that aesthetic values might not only be object-driven but also related to time, process, ethics and subjectivity” (Rendell 2013, p. 125). This socially performative practice follows a hunch that by drawing site-specific and temporal art practices into a critical correspondence with the disciplinary procedures of architecture, I could find ways to engage the relational attributes of place alongside the spatial. I affiliate this practice with political theorist Jane Bennett’s call for the artful cultivation of a disposition or mood of lively engagement with the world, in order to propel practices of ethical generosity. (Bennett 2001) In this paper I describe (and perform) a suite of four tactical and synchronous ways of operating that are situational, mobilised, ultra-locally oriented and sometimes stealthy. De Certeau tell us that tactics are a mutable practice, where situations can be seized and taken advantage of. The tactical is a means to “constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities’” (de Certeau 1984, p. xix). The tactical ways set forth in the paper expose and circulate a kind of practico-social-spatial dexterity. Rather than the more narrow constraints of disciplinarity, this is a specialism of the distributed and adaptive. To work with the complexity of place in such a way is to embrace the contingency and relationality of spatial production ahead of its material and object configurations.