Voices from the City
Theatrum Mundi leads Unit 1: Voices from the City at MA Cities, a postgraduate course launched in 2021. Positioned within an art school, MA Cities course explores pressing social, ethical and environmental concerns in the city through creative and reflexive methods, allowing students to examine their own position, practice and ethical stance.
Picking up on questions raised within The City Talks Back project, Unit 1 explores the mobility of the voice at various scales considering the tensions and injustices found at each scale. Structured through a series of transnational dues, the unit develops an awareness of the situated and contested nature of creative civic practice whilst considering the multiple ways of addressing, voicing and countering the challenges facing cities in transcultural social experiences and encounters.
In Voices from the City, we question how spatial practitioners use their voices, what infrastructures and networks they use to speak, and what effects their voices have. How are architecture and urban space used to amplify or even silence different voices? How can these voices act in, and on, the city? The unit establishes a situated position for learning and reflecting. It challenges students to reflect critically on their own specific cultural identities and express creatively their embodied experiences of living and practicing in the city.
Each transnational duet explores a different scale:
- At the local scale, we engage with the voices of the grassroots actors and activists exploring themes of citizenship (as felt experience), identity and displacement within specific urban contexts.
- At the city-wide scale, we explore platforming as situated practice (and shared experience) and their potential to uphold institutionally recognised forms of speech as well as serve as tools to critique, disrupt, and remake our urban environments.
- At the global scale, we consider polyphony and counterpoint (as transnational and polyphonic voices across cities) investigating the space and time relation of voices and the role of architecture and technology when these become political.
SPRINTS
Unit 1 also has the ‘Sprint’, an intensive teaching and learning weekend dedicated to practical skills and the production of work collectively and individually, supported by our team and a network of collaborators.
Unit 1 Sprint 2021: Theatrum Mundi partnered with Radio Espacio Estacion to produce CITIES LIVE, a 6-hour multilingual radio marathon that brought together musicians, poets, activists, artists, performers, researchers, djs, urbanists and architects to explore the relationship between cities and their citizens all over the world through live conversations, performances, and recordings.
Unit 3 Sprint 2021: Theatrum Mundi delivered a workshop and walking tour of Elephant and Castle focused on our ongoing research project Urban Backstages. The events were part of MA Cities Unit 3 sprint, an intensive weekend exploring the context of alternative urban and civic practices. The workshop initiated a broader critical discussion exploring the hidden systems of finance, governance, and social networks that enable these spaces to exist and analysing their underlying material and ecological conditions.
Unit 1 Sprint 2022: Theatrum Mundi delivered a series of workshops on ethical positioning, creative writing, sound editing and the production of podcasts.