Spaces of Knowledge Symposium

Spaces of Knowledge: Art, Urban Walking, and Empathetic Exchange

Friday 23rd and Saturday 24th May 2025

Day 1 - May 23rd, Symposium, 10.00-16.30 and Book Launch, 18.00-20.00.

RCA Battersea, Research Tower, 7 Floor, 15 Parkgate Road, London, SW11 4NL.

Day 2 - May 24th, Symposium and Group Walks, 10.00-16.00.

York Gardens Library, Winstanley Estate, 34 Lavender Road, London, SW11 2UG.

Please book tickets here to attend this free event.

Group walking is at the forefront of sustainable urban development and has the potential to be a powerful force to tackle social issues brought about by a globalised and urbanised world. Over the two days of panels discussion, performances and group walks we aim to connect leading researchers, artists, designers, urban planners and policymakers around four key areas: walking as method, walking and social justice, walking and policy development, walking and art practice; to propose new ways of shaping urban interventions that cultivate collective planning to foster a sense of belonging. The symposium draws on research undertaken by the Horizon 2020 research project Spacex-RISE (Spatial Practices in Art and Architecture for Empathetic Exchange), Walkative (RCA Walking project, founded in 2013), RCA/Wandsworth Council Impact Fellowship (Art and Urban Regeneration: live exchange as a method for policy development) and the recent publication Walking in Cities: Navigating Post-Pandemic Environments (Routledge 2024).

Programme

Day 1: RCA Battersea, Research Tower, 7 Floor. SW11 4NL.

10.00 Welcome and introduction - Jaspar Joseph-Lester

Panel 1. Walking as Method, Moderator: Simon King

10.20 Esther Leslie: One Way Streets and Silicon Valleys: Walking as Resistant Research Method

10.40 Natalie Bamford: Challenging the labour of participation through an evolution of walking for research

11.00 Susanne Prinz: From Flânerie to Promenadology: Urban Walking as Creative Method

11.20 Q&A

Tea and Coffee break (20 mins)

Panel 2. Walking and Policy. Moderator Jaspar Joseph-Lester

12.00 Grace Crannis and Anna Vickery: Support structures: context, negotiation and spaces for

artistic exchange in Local Government

12.20 Elisabeth Del Prete: Westminster Walk: a dialogue between APG and contemporary public

art practice

12.40 Dan Phillips: Streets for Diversity - exploring how neurodivergent people experience our streets

13.00 Q&A

13.20 Lunch

Panel 3. Walking and Social Justice. Moderator: Marisa Ferreira

14.30 Ahuvia Kahane: The Ethics of Geometry.

14.50 Scherazade Mahassini: Walking the Archives/Infrastructural Liminality

15.10 Dubravka Sekulic: Walking against organised abandonment, towards praxis

15.30 Krity Gera: Walking as Autonomy: Learning from informal gendered mobilities for a holistic understanding for experimenting with city streets

15.50 Q&A

16.10 Screening of Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s film: Lawscape and Spatial Justice (26 minutes).

17.30 Drinks reception, RCA Battersea, Research Tower, 7 Floor.

18.00 Book Launch, RCA Battersea, Research Tower, 7 Floor.

Walking in Cities: Navigating Post-Pandemic Environments (Routledge 2024).

Performance: Antonia Low: Walking Ahead

Performance: Anna Ådahl: Porous Body

Day 2: York Gardens Library, Winstanley Estate, SW11 4NL.

10.00 Tea and Coffee

10.30 Panel 4. Walking and Art Practice. Moderator: Carmen Mariscal

10.40 Jade Morgan: Walking the Estates: Shaping Regeneration Through Culture in Winstanley & York Road.

11.00 Kim Coleman: Exploring needs for darkness in urban space.

11.20 Manel Pons Romero: Infra-ordinary walk: a photographic dialogue with the non-human in the city.

11.40 Melanie Jackson: Art to Walk By - Sculpture in the Communal Spaces of Social Housing. A speculation on Gilbert Bayes and William Mitchell.

12.00 Q&A

12.30 Lunch

13:00 – 14:00 Group Walks Introduction

Walk 1: Led by Manel Pons Romero: Kit-Cat walk.

Walk 2: Led by Osman Yousefzada: Being somewhere else.

Walk 3: Led by Jaspar Joseph-Lester: A tour of public art commissions for Winstanley Estate.

Walk 4: Led by Georgia Perkins: (The Walkative Project) Eels on Cocaine: Molecular Biopolitics of Mass Toxicity.

Walk 5: Led by Corinne Noble and Simon King: Words In Between, SW11: A Punctuated Walking of York Gardens with N&K.

15.30 Summary / Closing remarks – Ahuvia Kahane

16.00 End

Convenenors:

• Marisa Ferreira is an artist and researcher based in Oslo and London. She holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art. Her research examines the relationship between waste and spatial justice and explores the role of the artist in urban planning.

• Jaspar Joseph-Lester is a London-based artist and Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Royal College of Art. His work explores the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in representations of modernity, urban renewal, regeneration and social organisation.

• Simon King is a London-based writer, walking artist and practice-based PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London. His research investigates the infrastructures of creative and critical practice in relation to walking, dialogue and social engagement.

• Carmen Mariscal is a London-based Mexican artist and researcher. She is a practice-based PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art. Her interdisciplinary practice explores traces of memory in dwellings.

Participants:

• Anna Ådahl is a Swedish artist and researcher. She uses the body as an investigative tool in her staged performances. Her PhD at the Royal College of Art (2022) addressed the aesthetics and politics of today’s post digital crowds.

• Natalie Bamford is a researcher focused on the integration of creative methods into traditional social science approaches. She uses a walking method and is currently exploring how the research exhibition can be used in healthcare research.

• Kim Coleman is an artist based in London. The ICA, Frieze Projects, The City of Edinburgh, and Glasgow International have commissioned her projects. In 2023, she completed a PhD at Reading School of Art.

• Grace Crannis is a designer and the Principal Planning Engagement Officer at Richmond and Wandsworth Councils. She leads a team working on engagement for planning and place projects with an emphasis on creativity and collaboration.

• Elisabeth Del Prete is a London-based, Italian/British curator. Her work experiments with collaborative art practices in public contexts. She is currently undertaking an AHRC-funded PhD at Birmingham City University.

• Krity Gera is an architect, designer and researcher, interested in codesigning with marginalised communities. She adopts concepts related to urban informality and feminist philosophy to explore hidden meanings within the context of the everyday.

• Melanie Jackson is a Senior Tutor in the Sculpture Programme at the RCA. Her work has a focus on bio-technologies, at shifting scales from the nanoscale to the planetary. She exhibits internationally and is represented by Matt's Gallery.

• Ahuvia Kahane is Regius Professor of Greek (1761), A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He writes about philology, time, complexity theory, ancient Greek and Roman literature and contemporary critical thought.

• Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies of Walter Benjamin and others, work on the biopolitical economy of dairy, with Melanie Jackson and recently a study of anti-fascist radio pioneer Ernst Schoen.

• Antonia Low is a Berlin-based artist and Professor of Sculpture at Hochschule Hannover. Her sculptural and conceptual work is concerned with the interaction between architecture, narratives, materiality and aesthetics.
   
• Shehrazade Mahassini is an artist, architect and researcher. She is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art. Her research questions the historicity of space production in former colonies and how it relates to segregated urban spaces in contemporary Western society.

• Jade Morgan is a Arts and Events Manager at Wandsworth Council, specialising in cultural place-shaping. She leverages arts and culture to create vibrant and inclusive living environments, within the Winstanley Estates regeneration and more recently in Nine Elms.

• Corinne Elinor Noble is a London-based artist, originally from Yorkshire. she has collaborated with the writer Simon King, as N&K, to create and lead imaginative group walks.

• Georgia Perkins is a Curatorial Fellow at SIRIUS, Cobh, County Cork, Ireland and has worked on numerous exhibitions and events with artists and writers. She is also a doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths College and a teaching fellow at Winchester School of Art.

• Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is an academic/artist/fiction author. He is Professor of Law and Theory at the University of Westminster, and Director of The Westminster Law & Theory Lab.

• Dan Phillips is a designer and engineer making products, services and environments better for everyone. He works as an Innovation Fellow and Studio Leader at the Intelligent Mobility Design Centre (IMDC) at the Royal College of Art.
   
• Susanne Prinz is a curator and writer based in Berlin. As director of Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, she has curated over 100 exhibitions with a focus on public and time-based art.

• Manel Pons Romero is a Paris-based photographer and performer. He is developing an infra-ordinary photography project in his urban exploratory walks. He holds two master's degrees in the creation and management of cultural projects in public spaces.

• Dubravka Sekulić is an architect, theorist and educator. Her research explores transformations of contemporary cities and the nexus between the production of space, laws, and economy. She holds the position of Programme Lead City Design MA at the Royal College of Art.

• Anna Vickery is a curator and the Strategic Lead for Cultural Place shaping in the Arts & Culture Service at Wandsworth Council. She develops strategic partnerships, projects and commissions and advises on arts and planning policy. She is an Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts.

• Osman Yousefada is a British artist and writer. He is a practice-based PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art and visiting fellow at Cambridge University. His interdisciplinary practice is concerned with the representation and rupture of the migrational experience.