Conceptual Practices

Final exercise - this is very simple too!

use the teams you had for practice in practice.

The teams chooses one text, from the list. Everybody reads the text.
After this the team meets to discuss the text. And focuses on one concept present in the text, which you find you can identify in some other exercise - the one your group did, or the intervention exercise.

11.12 we will have 15min to discuss the concept chosen by each group, and what kind of use they could find for the concept.

And some extra time to discuss your experience of the whole course.

List of readings:

You can use any of the texts we have already gone through:

• Jacques Ranciere: The Emancipated Spectator, published in Rancière, J. (2009). The Emancipated Spectator. London, New York: Verso.
• Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: May 68 Never Took Place. Generation Online
• Michel De Certeau: General Introduction to The Practice of Everyday. trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984
• Martin Heidegger: Building dwelling thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper Colophon Books, New York, 1971

Or choose one from the following options (for the texts, consult Taina and Reijo):

• Martin Heidegger: The Origin of the Work of Art
• Giorgio Agamben: The Coming Community (First four short chapters: Whatever, From Limbo, Example and Taking Place.
• Michel De Certeau: Making do: Uses and Tactics. In The Practice of Everyday.
• Michel De Certeau: Walking in the City. In The Practice of Everyday.
• Doreen Massey: Opening Propositions. In For Space.
• Paolo Virno: People vs Multitude. In A Grammar of the Multitude.

Works in Spaces: Practice Intervention exercise

This is really very simple.

You can work by yourself, or in paris or teams, as you wish, recruit fellow students to your intervention etc. And if you're recruited as part of somebody else's intervention, you can still do your own.

Choose a place. Consider how the place is "produced" through visible rules and regulations, how it restricts or guides or creates behavior and being. Consider how the place is USED. What do people do when they use the space/ place? What kind of practices do people have in the place? What kind of practices, usage, makes the place - and how? Into what kind of place?

Make in intervention, which makes visible how the place is produced, and/ or how it is used. The intervention can be a small thing, or a "big" visible event.

Document the intervention. A good thing would be to have a picture of the place as it is - and a picture that shows your intervention in the place. Add the place and the pics to the map (hopefully created by able people).

We will have monday 26th for you to work on the place and the intervention - if you need that.
On tuesday and wednesday we will go round and visit the places, and see the interventions on the spot. To plan this a little we need to have some kind of list, the places, and some sense of what will there be - is it like a sticker that can seen at any time or a performance that takes place at a certain time etc.

Wednesday afternoon we can discuss the experience. (Or, we can walk the interventions on tuesday, and use all of wednesday to discuss the interventions.)

Spectator in Practice

Exercise on spectators and spectatorship:

The exercise needs to be done by all the participants of the course together.

Identify an element from each group's Practices in Practice exercise. (Sitting in public, how skating changes a place, the non-place of City Market by the railway station; how elections transform places; the main entrance hallway of UC Pori).

Use those elements to think of an exercise of forming an audience. Choose a place, an do it - all together.

And to observe and discuss: of what were you the audience? Who was your audience? What effect did you/ your audience have on space/place?

Practices in Practice task

In groups:

Choose a practice - or a space/ place you want to study.

1. Analyse the strategy = the overt production of the place (where the practice takes place)
2. And analyse the tactics of the practice you have chosen
/ or of a practice/ practices in the space you have chosen:

= what does the practice do with the strategic overt production of the place/space?
= how does the practice use, "make do" the place/space?:
= how does the practice establish a "here"
= how does the practice establish a "now"
= how does the practice set the stage
= how does the practice appropriate the space
= how does it misuse/ abuse/ play with the space and its systemic rules?
= how does it relate to the audience? who is the audience? what is its role?
= what kind of event does the practice create?

Groups present their findings 12.11 10 - 12.

Programme for the course

5.11. Dasein - Event: being in the world, being as event. 
10 - 12        Reijo and Taina lecture on Dasein, Event and the World i.e. Space
12. - 13.30  Lunch and Dasein exercise.
13.30 - 16   Walking and talking through the exercises.
Text for next time: De Certeau: Practices of Everyday Life/ General Introduction
 6.11. Practices in texts
10 - 13        Walking through the text.
Practice exercise for the next time: in groups, study a chosen practice happening in space.

12.11. Practices in Practice
10 - 12       Walking and talking through the exercises.
Text for next time: Ranciere: Emancipated Spectator

21.11. Spectator and audience
10 - 12        Walking through the text.
12. - 13.30     Lunch and Spectator in Practice exercise.
13.30 - 16    Walking and talking through the exercise.
Practice intervention exercise for 27. and 28.11: individual interventions.
Conceptual exercise for groups: Texts for 11.12 time: an article per group. Groups read the article and discuss it, focus on some concepts within the text - and how to connect the concepts to a space/practice/Dasein/Event.


26.11. Working on Works in Spaces
10 - 16         Working on the individual interventions/ teachers available for consultation.

27.11.  Works in Spaces
10 - 13          Walking through the individual Practice Intervention exercises on site, and discussion.

28.11.  Works in Spaces and on Spaces
10 - 16          Walking through the individual Practice Intervention exercise documentations, and discussion.

11.12. Conceptual Practices
10 - 12         Walking and talking through the  Conceptual exercises for groups.
12 - 13         Discussing the course.