As a contemporary response, we have framed this Avani Annual Research Symposium 2022 as FRICTION: Towards a Postcolonial Pedagogy and Practice in Architecture. This is an attempt to expand on the nature of inequalities and exclusions, contested sites and other areas often difficult to access.
We are talking of space and a critical spatial practice beyond accepted architectural studies, existing archives, even existing research. We can speak of ‘the subaltern’ within this friction and the friction within the ‘subaltern’; those Invisible, contested, minor and marginalised architectures with uncharted, even unrecognized opportunities. Expanding ideas of tensions and friction, this also speak to “community as method”; how ‘community’ offers collective potential contributing to the complex, social relationships revealed within a subaltern architecture, where marginalisation and community begin to offer ways of (re)making and (re)thinking of architecture. What would our contribution be to an architecture as a direction towards post-colonial pedagogy? How do we ground this in our programmes and our research towards a re-aligned practice of architecture? Whether we choose to overlook, impose or mediate, these subaltern architectures and spatial frictions will define us as the century becomes our present not our future.
Theme 01: The Memories of Friction
