Lau­ren Brin­cat: ​‘Con­ver­sa­tions on Shad­ow Architecture’

Lau­ren Brin­cat is includ­ed in Con­ver­sa­tions on Shad­ow Archi­tec­ture, a project curat­ed by Ineke Dane that was born out of a trip to Cairo in May 2012, in the weeks pri­or to Egyp­t’s first demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­tion after the Arab Spring. 

Con­ver­sa­tions on Shad­ow Archi­tec­ture (C o S A) was born from a trip to Cairo in May 2012, in the weeks sur­round­ing Egypt’s first demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­tion after the Arab Spring. At the time I was liv­ing in Berlin, and images of Tahir Square’s makeshift tent-city – tem­porar­i­ly home to thou­sands of pro­tes­tors, activists and cit­i­zens – was a nascent sym­bol of the rev­o­lu­tion that became syn­ony­mous with Crit­i­cal Spa­tial Prac­tice (CSP). CSP can be under­stood as a the­o­ret­i­cal lens and prac­ti­cal mode to crit­i­cal­ly engage with the cul­tur­al, social and polit­i­cal poten­tial of space and archi­tec­ture. A decade lat­er and in the con­tin­u­ing con­text of glob­al upris­ings (Black Lives Mat­ter, #MeToo, fac­tion resur­gences, cli­mate advo­ca­cy) CSP has renewed rel­e­vance as a use­ful tool for col­lec­tive agi­ta­tion, where new and inter­est­ing ways to live in the world are con­scious­ly cul­ti­vat­ed while draw­ing lessons from the past.

As a thought exer­cise with artists, com­posers, archi­tects and thinkers since 2012, C o S A has grown like an octo­pus to incor­po­rate inter­re­lat­ed limbs that find a nexus with­in CSP. Here archi­tec­ture (built and unbuilt, its absence as much as pres­ence), pol­i­tics, his­to­ry, economies and the future are under­stood as inex­tri­ca­bly linked through com­plex net­works of spa­tial vari­ables that affect the way we think, feel, move, make deci­sions and oper­ate togeth­er. C o S A invites audi­ences to engage with and read their dai­ly sur­round­ings, with the hope that this more entan­gled under­stand­ing will lead to new forms of empow­er­ment for both the indi­vid­ual and diverse com­mu­ni­ty ecolo­gies. Rather than pro­vid­ing answers C o S A ques­tions how the world around us chore­o­graphs our very being. 

Metro Arts, Bris­bane
2 – 30 Octo­ber 2021