Across Minds and a Move in Course
(February 2024)
Shared by Emma Esmeralda Domino and Maia Alva Martinsen Garrido | Traced by Karen Werner
As humans and architects, we rely on our imagination and will to empathise with others' realities and stories. The topic we will dedicate these days to embraces different aspects of forced migration, how it feels to be neglected, abandoned and seen as an outsider. How is living and being in temporary at-risk environments experienced? What are the reasons and consequences of leaving? What sacrifices are made? And what is gained?
Participants are given fragments from three selected books, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of not being Heard, The Buddha in the Attic and Lose your Mother. In addition to reading and absorbing literature together, our aim is that the course will gain from us being social and on the move. We believe walking brings intimate and honest reflections, and will therefore use it as a platform for conversation.
Through physical and spatial experiences, we will explore contrasts between topic and space, questioning intimacy and challenging our vulnerability. Our goal is to transcend the “on behalf of” and enter into the “other”. Fiction always comes from somebody “real” with real experiences and complex lives.
Through this, our hope is to collectively start finding ways to position ourselves, through various modes of written expressions. By practicing collective reading, writing and reflecting, the wish is that both the course participants as well as the course conductors engage in informal, unorthodox ways of approaching a particularly challenging and sensitive theme.
Emma Esmeralda Domino and Maia Alva Martinsen Garrido (both she/her) are two final year students at Bergen School of Architecture, who are working together on a diploma thesis with the topic of women forced to flee. Sprung out from this, arose the curiosity in finding various ways of sharing as methods of gaining compassion towards others.
Karen Werner (she/her) is an artist and sociologist working with radio, text and performance. Karen makes radio stations of varying durations and scales. SkottegatenFM was a mini-FM radio station transmitting daily from my dining room table for three months including neighbourhood street party broadcasts. In 2021 Karen launched an ongoing citywide community AM + FM radio station called Radio Multe 93.8FM, inspired by multebær (cloudberries). She is also part of the international feminist radio group, Shortwave Collective. Karen is an Artistic Research Fellow at the Faculty for Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen.