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At the playground: Working for a feminist urban curriculum
This essay was commissioned by artist Shahrzad Malekian and curator Ida Højgaard for the book 2024 Breaking Ground with Play.
Playgrounds breathe laughter and joy, liveliness and vibrancy into cities. Playgrounds breathe order into bodies, make them move and behave in certain ways. Playgrounds are sites of play. Playgrounds are sites of work. Playgrounds are sites of freedom. Playgrounds are sites of surveillance. Somewhere between these observations began my interest in playgrounds and their significance to working toward a feminist urban curriculum. Specifically, the interest is in the modern idea of the playground, which emerged during the historical period when urbanization took command and gave rise to a new type of public space and urban infrastructure. Playgrounds, much like other dedicated outdoor public spaces such as parks, are part of the modern outdoor infrastructure of cities. Such public spaces are not only key to the critical understanding of the material making and spatial organization of urban modernity, but also to the analysis of the political economies and cultural imaginaries that shaped the modern urban condition. Today, as we inhabit the afterlife of urban modernity, which was constituted by capitalism, coloniality, and patriarchy joining forces to reorganize the conditions of life and death under the regimes of exploitation, extraction and domination, there is growing interest across the humanities and the arts to have access to subjugated histories and to more complex understandings of how modern urbanization took command of everyday life. At the same time, there is anti-colonial and queer feminist insistence to ‘take back the city’ and to envision care-full urban imaginaries in order to create and build urban realities otherwise. I propose here the notion of a feminist urban curriculum for both the critical study of the urban condition, in particular the effects of capitalist-colonial- patriarchal urban modernity and their importance to contemporary planetary urbanization, and for imagining the urban otherwise. For such a feminist urban curriculum, the playground is an excellent site to start from.
Absent a comprehensive and comparative anti-colonial and queer feminist history of urban playgrounds, this text patches together some contemporary and historical observations to provide e a critical reflection of the playground which presents a public space and a site of gendered and racialized work that, so far, has remained largely overlooked in feminist urban theories. The notion of the urban curriculum is introduced in order to approach the meanings of the playground in relation the formation of the modern urban condition. Furthermore, this idea urban curriculum also allows to critically understood playgrounds in relation to the conditions of contemporary urban life under compulsory neoliberalism with increasing social and ecological injustice, rising wealth inequality, relentless competition in the accelerated race of capitalism, life-long debt sentences because of increasing property values caused by gentrification, imperiled health because of cuts and increasing environmental and climate threats. The urban curriculum is understood as a set of instructions operating on the level of bodies and environments of cities. The urban curriculum is embodied, which means, that it is lived and performed through the movements and behaviors of urban bodies. The urban curriculum is materialized, that is bodily, social, environmental and material.
Feminist work is never done: Building the World Otherwise
This essay was commissioned by AAA Diversity Collaborative Architecture at the Architecture School in Aarhus to serve as foreword to their 2024 book BUILDING AND BREAKING – 8 Conversations about Spatial Justice.
Feminist work is never done. Does this sound familiar? I think it does. It is an observation of past realities just as much as it is a forecast of futures yet to come. Knowing, and insisting, that feminist and queer feminist work is never done is a statement that wraps all into one the feelings of hope, joy, worry, frustration, anger, grief, and gratitude.
Hope, because feminist and queer feminist work is never useless. As the efforts of this work continue, we understand better how the mess we have inherited came about and we also see with more clarity how the mess we have made of the conditions of planet Earth, our shared home, needs to be dealt with. Hope, because feminist and queer feminist work is never done in isolation, it builds on the work of others, who have and are doing feminist and queer feminist work, even if we find ourselves in disagreement with each other. Hope, because feminist and queer feminist work nourishes solidarity, practices how to practice together with many others, including others, who are not humans, who are elements, animals, plants. Feminist and queer feminist work cannot stop at the oppressive boundaries of speciesism. Joy, because feminist and queer feminist work gives pleasure, builds affinities and alignments, and brings new imaginaries how things could be otherwise into the world. Joy, because feminist and queer feminist work insists on turning imaginaries into realities, however messy, dysfunctional, imperfect these new realities may turn out to be. Joy, because feminist and queer feminist work gives reason for celebration and continuation, for strength and endurance, even if our strengths and our endurances are actually, at the very same time, also our vulnerabilities and our weaknesses. Worry, because the work starts from knowing and feeling that things are not all right, that everything will most likely never be all right, that politics cannot be trusted, that states can turn violent, that economies chain themselves to values that despise life and annihilate the very resources for living. Worry, because worry is an epistemic relation to the world we have created and to the planet we live with, an epistemic relation that is formed through understanding that we are inter-connected, inter-vulnerable, and inter-dependent in care. Worry, because worrying together, collective worry, is a remedy against the compulsory individualism of neoliberal responsibilization. Frustration, because the enormities of violence and oppression and domination and power are such that it is easy to feel that one is made to be helpless, that the system cannot be undone, that the structures of discrimination and injustice resurface with agility and keep changing, transforming, even rejuvenating often under the semblance of making things better. Frustration, because so much time and energy, time and energy of one’s own life, time and energy of the lives of many, are invested and only little seems to be achieved. Frustration, because there is constant push-back and hostility. Frustration, because the push-back and hostility can quite easily infect solidarity and alignment and lead to in-fighting and conflicts.
Frustration, because one hears, reads, ultimately always already knows, that the work will have to begin again, the next morning, the next evening, the next day, the next month, the next year. Anger, because one knows that one ultimately ends up provoking anger and thus hostility and push-back by many of those who are in power, in control, and in charge of things. Their anger and hostility, supported by structural power, leads to one’s own deepening anger because the root causes of injustice, inequity, discrimination, and continued violence through exploitation, expropriation, extraction, and exclusion. Grief, because one knows of many feminist stories of resistance without good endings, one knows that the degrading and death-making conditions of misogyny and gynophobia still exist, one knows that feminist struggles have not been able to save, and safeguard, human and non-human life, care, and planet Earth. Gratitude, because despite of it all, feminist work continues and changes in the most meaningful and beautiful ways over time and across locations.
Review of the book: https://www.indesignlive.com/uncategorized/danish-spatial-justice
The Elemental Turn
The Elemental Turn
This essay was commissioned by Joanna Warsza and Lorena Moreno Vera for the book The Way of the Water.
Why are we currently experiencing an elemental turn? Why are today’s artists and writers addressing the four elements: water, earth, fire and air? I will attempt to outline an answer to these questions, and I propose that we recognise the elemental turn as a critical diagnosis of contemporary life that is both an answer and a reaction to the climate catastrophe and the deepening destruction of the environment. In addition to this, this essay will set out three arguments that are relevant to the development of a new elemental ethics. Firstly, such an elemental ethics is essential as a means of drawing our attention to the current human-made state of the elements and of insisting that we take political and economic action that is based on our responsibility to these elements. Secondly, elemental ethics focuses on the irrevocable physical interdependence of people and thirdly, it also highlights the elements’ inherent right to exist, which is neither inferior nor subordinate to our rights as humans.
Not Beyond Repair
Not Beyond Repair – Contribution to Field Notes on Repair: 4, 2024
If capitalism has taught people one thing, it is a specific understanding of made things’ lifespans: sell-by dates, use-by dates, and, I want to add here, repair-by dates. To be “beyond repair” means that this date has passed; fixing or reconstituting has become impossible, futile. The capitalist imperative is to relate to the world in such a way that being beyond repair marks the end of useful life for things and environments — and this means living in a world that cannot be saved. Things are thrown away; environments are abandoned. Care is no longer required. “Beyond repair” is a sentence of death. Beyond repair neatly articulates capitalism’s imperative to incorporate death-making into economic relations, which in turn penetrate deep into social and ecological relations. This leads to a belief that social and ecological relations are also beyond repair; that it does not matter to repair them; that capitalism will only usurp any energies expended toward repair. But social and ecological relations are not beyond repair; it does matter to repair them; and reparative energies can, I want to argue, be effective.
Feminist Infrastructural Critique: Life-Affirming Practices Against Capital
https://www.fkw-journal.de/index.php/fkw/issue/view/89
Infrastructure is the condition of modern life. The spread of racial capitalism and colonial patriarchy relied on railroads, waterways, dams, sanitation, sewage, power lines, or phone lines and the economies of extraction and labor supporting them. Infrastructure is the facilities and the systems of public works, often operated by the state and, at the same time, essential for cross-border or trans-boundary connectivity. Traditional modern infrastructures have been joined, and transformed, by digital infrastructures and given rise to new forms of digital and platform capitalism. Terms like green infrastructure or blue infrastructure make understood how so-called natural resources are seen as ecosystem services for carbon storage or pollution removal. Social infrastructure refers to facilities that support social services including housing, healthcare, and education. Infrastructure is ubiquitous, essential, and often invisible. Infrastructure requires permanent maintenance, repair, and care.
Becoming Response-Able: For a Feminist Ethics of Responsibility
Becoming Response-Able: For a Feminist Ethics of Responsibility is an essay commissioned by artist Irene Lagator Pejović and art historian Monika Leisch-Kiesl.
Arm, Hand, Mineral: Extraction Dreams
The essay “Arm, Hand, Mineral: Extraction Dreams” is a contribution to artist Micol Roubini’s book La Montagna Magica. The book and the essay deal with the largest disused asbestos quarry in Europe, located not far from Turino/Italy. My writing forms part of the emerging planetary humanities across the arts and scholarship and their commitment to scioecological aesthetics and ethics. 
Vivre avec une planète blessée: Sensibiliser aux infrastructures, in Étonner La Catastrophe
Architecture plays a key role in this convergence of economic, climatic and social crisis. Construction is under scrutiny and questioned, while architects everywhere are seeking and experimenting with new ways of making architecture to thwart the prognosis. What is architecture in a catastrophic world? How can we be architects in a world that is falling apart?
Le musée du séisme 921 de Taïwan 921 地震教育園區 par Wenwen Cai • Vivre avec une planète blessée : sensibiliser aux infrastructures par Elke Krasny • Chaosmose par Hélène Guenin • Seveso, la catastrophe vaporiséepar Josselin Vamour • Vivre dans l’accident intégral par Jean Richer • Une maison en A dans le Berry par Guillaume Aubry • Droits miniers par Lara Almarcegui
https://planlibre.eu/librairie/etonner-la-catastrophe/
Porös-Werden. Geteilte Räume, urbane Dramaturgien, performatives Kuratieren
Wo finden heute öffentliche Begegnungen und gesellschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen statt? Wie können die Räume von Theatern oder Museen porös werden, um neue Vorstellungen geteilter Räume in migrantischen und diasporischen Stadtgesellschaften zu erproben? Stadttheater, städtische Museen und Kunst im öffentlichen Raum sind mehr denn je herausgefordert, Öffentlichkeiten als demokratisches Gut herzustellen, ihre Relevanz für Stadtgesellschaften unter Beweis zu stellen und ihre Ressourcen zu teilen. Institutionen sind damit befasst, ihre infrastrukturellen Verpflichtungen und öffentlichen gesellschaftlichen Aufgaben zu reflektieren und zu verändern. Selbstorganisierte Initiativen, auch in Kollaboration mit Institutionen, leisten Wesentliches für das Porös-Werden und erzeugen durch kulturelle und künstlerische Arbeiten neue Vorstellungen geteilter öffentlicher Räume. Dieses Buch versammelt Beiträge von Dramaturg*innen, Kurator*innen und Wissenschaftler*innen, die neue Praxen geteilter Räume, performativen Kuratierens und urbaner Dramaturgien vorstellen und theoretisch reflektieren.
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