We don’t make places from nothing. We combine consciousness and capacity to make where we are into places we wish to be. The way we, imperatively, unfix and elaborate the places in which we find ourselves, involves coming to terms with violent processes and oppressive infrastructures. It’s precious to acknowledge how our experiences and imaginations of place-making, while resisting enclosure in different ways, share a sense of commonality, and how our understanding of it sustains and generates collective capacity. At the same time, it’s also precious to recognize how this commonality is ghostly stuff. It escapes the lens-based practices that attempt to objectify, capture or narrativize it. Instead, it calls for a cinematic approach that is attentive to the qualities of its hazy and undefined presence.

‍Ciné Place-Making traces various cinematic ways of making common cause with situated practices of place-making. How to take feeling and agency as constitutive of the way situated imaginations of place-making become rehearsed on the screen? How to tailor cinematic methods to serve with care, providing a holding environment that often extends beyond the apparent and the articulated?

Format: Lecture and discussion accompanied by a film programme in the evening and subsequent days.