This event will be conducted in-person in Room 315F and through Zoom. 

For in-person attendance, please register in advance here.
For Zoom attendance, please register here.

Collective assemblies and pedagogies of commons are about searching for the spatial politics of horizontalities that lead us (practitioners in the thresholds) to parameters of scales and slow-violence of sociopolitical conditions of infrastructures. Any scale of infrastructures, from a refugee tent to a community garden to an alternative gathering of pedagogies of unlearning, leads to the question of the spatial justice of where, in which condition, and with whom. Practitioners and educators in between architecture, geography, urbanism, and art create a critical discourse and methodology through commoning in diverse trans-localities. Tan suggests transforming assemblies to transversal method-based alliances; and developing urgent pedagogies in architecture and spatial practices with diverse horizontal alliances. Threshold infrastructure is the gathering, the base of alliances that reactivates the threshold, the in-betweens, and the collective survival. Alternative collectively initiated pedagogical platforms and assemblies are emancipative forms of solidarity, care, resistance, and knowledge production. What are the urgencies of architecture pedagogies in contested territories? How can pedagogies reveal and bring about ways of unlearning and undoing? Can alternative approaches in education and research reach beyond established institutional structures and through transversal and collective approaches? Do they make a difference in transforming knowledge, and how do they shape the architectural practice of the present?

Tan will present pedagogical design and art projects on critical spatial practices and will introduce the Urgent Pedagogies project (IASPIS). A Q&A session moderated by Jayne Miller will follow the presentation.

Prof. Pelin Tan, P.hD., is the 6th recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship of Art and Activism at Bard College (2019). She is a Turkish art historian and sociologist, currently a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Batman based in Mardin, Turkey. She is a senior research fellow of the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research in Boston. For more than two decades, she has focused on urban and territorial conflict, commons, labor conditions, alternative pedagogies, and methodologies in art and architecture. She was a lead author of the Urban Society report by IPSP (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018). She contributed to several publications such as Climates: Architecture and The Planetary Imaginary (Columbia Univ., 2017), Refugee Heritage (2021), Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022), Designing Modernity: Architecture in the Arab World, 1945–1973 (Jovis, 2021), From Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023), Agonistic Assemblies (Sternberg/MIT Press, 2024). 

Tan is an editor of the i Press established by architect Mary Otis Stevens based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and  supported by the Graham Foundation (2023). Her forthcoming books include the following: Forms of Non-Belonging (E-flux Books, Sternberg/MIT Press, 2025), and Threshold Architecture (DPR-Barcelona, 2025).

She curated Gardentopia/Matera ECC 2019, was associate curator of the first Istanbul Design Biennial Adhocracy (2012), and co-curator of Urgent Pedagogies (IASPIS). Tan was a Postdoc at MIT (2011), a fellow of The Japan Foundation (2012) and Hong Kong Design Trust (2016), DAAD (2006-2007), and others. She co-directed several short films with artist Anton Vidokle and got the Sharjah Film Prize (2020) for their last film: Gılgamesh: She, Who Saw the Deep (2022). Her current short documentary Landscapes as Archives about the production of architecture in Palestine is on view at the Qattan Foundation, Ramallah (2023). 

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.