Secondment

27 Jan 2023 – 28 Feb 2023

LOCABULARY – A KIND OF DUBITATIVE AND PROVOCATIVE MULTIMEDIA GLOSSARY  TO BE WALKED THROUGH AND LIVED IN. 

LOCABULARY stems from the need to give a name to the urban experiences and spatial practices stimulated by the SPACEX project.

LOCABULARY is a way of noting and describing the spatial practices that each of the subjects within the SPACEX project experiences and could imagine.

LOCABULARY is a glossary on “loci” with or without “genius”. 

LOCABULARY aims at provoking practices and observing their effects rather than cataloguing and prescribing them. 

LOCABULARY is conceived as a space to be inhabited: there are streets to walk along, places to stop, squares to discuss, gardens to contemplate, etc. 

ROADS are conceptual paths indicated by opposing terms, guiding concepts. 

Each POINT on a street can be considered a lemma, i.e. a word or locution. 

The PIAZZA is the place to bring one’s own experiences and to propose new ones. A place for discussion and confrontation, in the PIAZZA practices are gathered and proposed to be replicated.

Each LEMMA may include: 

• One or more descriptions of a word or expression; Definitions may in fact be multiple and disagree, so it is not certain that a certain term corresponds to a single description.  

• Images, videos, audio, links, etc. to provide examples of the concept described.

These may be in-depth studies and examples that already exist or have been collected and produced specifically in the SPACEX network cities. 

• Questions and issues that may arise from a given headword.

• The reference to other lemmas linked by opposition or affinity.

The connections are partly determined by the ‘roads’ but the LOCABULARY can function like a rhizome, that is, following a principle of connection and ethereogeneity in which ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other and must be’ (Deleuze-Guattari).

23 May – 4 June 2024 (1st part)

DOORS is an augmented reality software for mobile devices. It was conceived during my secondment in Nicosia at AHDR (May 2024) and after a series of urban explorations aimed at exploring conflicting narratives of public space. 1) The first step was to identify sites that are significant for the memory of the city of Nicosia, and in particular those sites that are the subject of conflicting memories and practices. 2) The second step was to collect photos and videos of the sites, as well as accounts from direct or indirect witnesses (e.g. from literature). 3) Then I designed a city trail based on some of the most significant narratives collected. 4) Finally I created an AR interface for mobile devices with the content collected during the urban explorations.

DOORS was implemented using technology that allows content to be uploaded and enjoyed on a smartphone without the need to download apps or other softwares. Just frame an image or an object to unlock audio, video, textual, etc. associated. DOORS makes it possible to create urban itineraries with stops that function as “milestones” to be reached in order to discover traces of contested and conflicting memories. Finally, DOORS allows each user to insert their own augmented content linked to specific milestones. In this way, it is possible to create participatory and interactive urban itineraries in dialogue with the oral and multimedia archives of a city.

The first prototype focused on Nicosia and Modena and can be refined and adapted to the future needs of each partner. For example, one of the possible future experiments could be to work with children in a playful-creative form of urban exploration and collection of information and narratives about the city’s spaces to be included in a mobile AR system.

17/8/24 – 31/8/24

In the second half of August this year, I undertook part of my SpaceX-Rise secondment in The Netherlands, hosted by Stroom Art Centre in The Hague. The secondment was coordinated by Stroom’s wonderful and brilliant Lua Vollard, a fellow SpaceX-Rise member who couldn’t have been more welcoming and supportive. I was fully immersed at the time in two ongoing research projects: a study of race and racism in sports video games, with Associate Professor Paul Campbell, University of Leicester, and Dr Anika Leslie-Walker, Nottingham Trent University; and a number of inquiries into the male-centred and reactionary/antifeminist online ‘Manosphere’, most notably a study of its Indian incarnation with Dr Saba Hussain, University of Birmingham. In this brief context, it’s difficult to encapsulate the full usefulness of this experience to these projects, and my broader agenda, but I will try.

My secondment took me first to Stroom itself (obviously) and exposure to some of the great work Lua continues to undertake there (including a really interesting project around women and gaming). I then visited New Institute, Rotterdam, where I was privileged to meet its senior researcher, Dr Ramon Amaro. This was followed by a meeting with Professor Geert Lovink at The Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. Finally, I met with Dr Daniël de Zeeuw, University of Amsterdam, to discuss our overlapping work with a view to future collaborations.

I had been grappling with two key challenges at the time – one practical, the other more conceptual. First, Paul had asked me to lead on a second article relating to our work on racism in video games, based on the same dataset as the first but geared more towards my digital-theoretical interests. Fully ‘unlocking’ this had proven frustrating – that is, until my encounter with Ramon whose groundbreaking work on technology and Black identities provided the ‘circuit breaker’ that enabled me to envision a second article genuinely differentiated from the first. Just yesterday (at the time of writing), this was accepted for publication in Oxford University Press’ exciting new Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context series. 

The second, in some ways pretentious, ‘challenge’ related to my theoretical wavering over the respective utility of social vs. technological determinisms in understanding digital cultures – i.e. do we shape technologies, or do they shape us? My (now ongoing) discussions with Geert, a scholar with an extensive background in both digital research and (pre- and post-digital) social activism helped me realise how unhelpfully arbitrary the binary itself is. Complimenting this was both my subsequent meeting with Daniël, but also my wider exposure over the period (especially the work being undertaken at New institute) to art-practice engagements with the ‘digital’. These engagements seem to almost inevitably dissolve boundaries between human and technology, and in ways that continue to inform my more ‘theory’-based work as digital sociologist and writer.

05/02/2024 to 19/02/2024 and 04/01/2025 to 21/01/2025

The aim for my secondment in Prague is to explore critical spatial practices that challenge contemporary urbanisation processes and support spatial justice through critique and imagination. The exploration of such practices is closely connected to my PhD research. 

I decided to divide my secondment in two parts:

The first part aimed at understanding the Prague creative scene and mapping individuals, groups, institutions, spaces and practices that are connected to the aim of my research. The host institution’s network and suggestions were an important part in achieving this.  During the first two weeks in Prague, I was able to follow several exhibitions and participate in different activities. For example, I visited the “Right to Housing” exhibition in Galerie Jaroslava Fragnera that examined a series of actions organised by different collectives in the city to claim the right to housing. I also had the chance to participate in a walking tour by the “Corrupt Tour” team that investigated different corruption cases that influenced urban development in the city. 

The second part of my secondment (forthcoming) will revolve around contacting some of the identified groups and individuals to conduct semi-structured interviews. The interviews will revolve around the aims and processes behind the practices of these agents, their approaches and ways of working, the challenges they face and the potentials they see in developing their practices further.

Through this, the aim will be to understand the ecology of spatial practices taking place in the Prague scene, analyse some key examples that are relevant to my work, and use this knowledge to enrich and contextualise my own practice. In this way my hope is to gain a better understanding of how such spatial practices unfold and raise critical questions that could enable new paths for further exploration of how spatial practices can support spatial justice.

July 12 to August 13, 2023

During my secondment in Palestine from July 12 to August 13, 2023, I was hosted by Wonder Cabinet, a space for art production and cultural development in Bethlehem. The objective of my stay was to explore how arts organizations and cultural practitioners develop spatial practices of resistance to counter the destruction of Palestinian heritage. This destruction, termed “epistemicide,” seeks to erase Palestinian histories, culture, and identities, a process that has persisted since the Nakba of 1948. My research focused on understanding how these practices preserve collective memory and challenge systemic erasure.

I collaborated with key cultural organizations, including Al Mamal Foundation in Jerusalem’s Old City, Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation in Ramallah, and Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center. These organizations, alongside smaller cultural spaces and practitioners, work at the intersections of art, ecology, and heritage preservation. Their efforts provided a comprehensive view of strategies used to sustain and protect Palestinian heritage.

My methods were grounded in feminist approaches, particularly in-depth interviewing with recursive and close listening as a feminist-relational practice. This allowed me to engage deeply with participants, gaining nuanced insights into their lived experiences and the socio-political challenges they navigate. I prioritized fostering a relational and respectful approach, ensuring participants felt heard and valued while also remaining self-aware of my own positionality.

This experience highlighted the vital role of arts and culture in resisting systemic oppression and preserving collective memory. It also underscored the resilience and creativity of Palestinian cultural practitioners, offering valuable insights into how spatial practices of resistance can be cultivated and sustained in contexts of ongoing adversity.

June 2024

I have employed critical play during my secondment at Van Abbemuseum as an approach to storytelling. More precisely, I used a board game entitled ‘Explore the Trail: Narrations Across Palestine’, designed in collaboration with students in a graduate seminar I teach at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus. We played the game with young migrants and members of the Palestinian solidarity groups in Rotterdam and Eindhoven. The action involves the gamification of solidarity. It expands the pedagogic strategies into the networks of civil society. It translates the idea of the Palestinian conflict and Israeli occupation into tangible elements that relate to the fractured Palestinian landscape in the West Bank. The game invites people who are curious about Palestine and do not know how to get involved due to the polarization of the society. It offers a means to bring together various memories and narratives of the audience regarding Palestine and other relevant regions worldwide.

(Explore the Trails: Narrations Across Palestine, performed in Rotterdam and Eindhoven, excerpt from my diary, June 2024) 

“It is not the stories that are important but the framework that encourages people to tell them, the environment that makes them feel safe to narrate.

The board game “Explore the Trail: Narrations Across Palestine” provides such a framework. The game’s mechanics keep a dynamic yet fragile balance between playing the game and storytelling. Storytelling is a currency in playing the game. When the fragile balance is disturbed by playing, storytelling doesn’t have such a weight in the play unfolding. The ‘co-hikers’, the name of the game players, rush to reach their destination before they run out of their designated game rounds. The fragile balance may additionally be disturbed when one storytelling invites the other and the other and the other. It is contagious. Yet, necessary to turn an individual right of the game into a collective one.

I don’t record the stories. I take a few notes during play. I write true fiction stories out of the co-hikers’ narratives. I am listening. I am playing too. I am telling stories. I feel part of the action. They feel that too.

I only take a few photos. I don’t want to make the ‘co-hikers’ feel objects of study. They probably feel so at the beginning of the game. Yet they forget along the way. They often forget is a game when they rush to save their comrade co-hiker trapped in a military zone, or behind a roadblock. They endlessly discuss how to bypass the roadblock. Should they add a landscape -board square piece- from this side or the opposite one? They count their moves to the nearest exit: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. They have just thrown two dice: 3 with a cube one with six numbers and 4 with a pyramid with four numbers. They add a ‘desert’ landscape next to a ‘village’ one. They spot the position in the ‘desert’ where they can flip a card from the cards’ stack. Who knows! They may pick one that suits their cause.

“What is more important, the storytelling, the play, the game design or the impact of playing?” a colleague asks me, while drinking a beer after the end of the two play sessions in which he participated.

“All!”, I answer.” 

Images, courtesy of S. Stratis, 2024

September 2023

Contributing some thoughts on Casco’s practices of Unlearning
Between formal and informal discussions with Marianna Takou, executive director of Casco, Aline Hernández, artistic director of Casco, Sari Dennise, their comrade, designer and member of the Cráter Invertido Cooperative (Mexico) and the Arts Collaboratory ecosystem, other members of Casco’s community and exhibition visitors, we shared meals, been toured by Müge Yilmaz, artist and co-founder of the queer-eco-feminist art project Four Siblings, around the community garden of the initiative, exchanged references on critical thinking, commoning ethos and solidarity-based interconnection of art initiatives. We explored ideas of collaboration within and against contemporary dominant modes of cultural production, towards approaches of interdependence, mutuality and care.

Our bodies are time-machines, I remember reading somewhere during my first visit to Casco, and it stuck in my mind as a primary point of observation in the various methods, practices and exercises that the collective performs from time to time. Time comes as the core issue, after the recognition that our everyday times and spaces are limited in instant encounters or interactions, rendering it at least difficult to build alternative collective behaviours, let alone community bonds. Challenging the ways in which culture and knowledge are being produced, could reveal new ways not only critical to the established dominant ones, but also in a direction that transgresses them. The mapping of everyday habits enables critical reflection on personal actions in dialogue with those of the collective, in terms of needs and common aspirations. Peculiar action-designs, such as the Unlearning Exercises, that were attempted in collaboration with the artist Annette Krauss, are helping us to rethink the relational dynamics of our encounters and the spatial tactics that enable and establish them on the basis of a perpetual present. Collective imaginative acts of performing collaborative gestures could lead us to the construction of a subjectivity with an ethos of mutuality and care against pervasive individualism and social isolation.

Another example of performing a call for collaboration is the Nina bell F. House Museum exhibition; the opening of the institution’s archive publicly to the visitor. Having been built as a common ground, it is narrating the memory of Casco, by exhibiting at the same time successes, achievements, moments of change, mappings for the redefinition of the group, the reorientation of its practices, showing moments of development of new expectations and queries. Simultaneously, the exhibition is being communicated as an invitation, through space, for participation. The visitor can contribute not only to the unfolding of these moments while exploring them, but also as an archivist -from an inside position now- to inhabit it as a constant space-in-the-making, that encourages depositing new speeches or other traces, forming a landscape of correlation and potential reference.

A potentially distinctive way of Casco to provide us a mechanism for cultivating the imagination for new subjectification endeavours, is the playful gestures of hybridization. The synthesis of well-known established social meanings, such as the House-Museum title of the archive-public and the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills project, constitutes an unfamiliarisation process that could indicate new forms of openness. While composing pre-existing established concepts, it produces a new field for the “unknown” to emerge and forms new horizons of alliance’s possibilities. Resembling passages of negotiation, between the home space and the museum space, succeeds to suggest new meaning-making methods, understanding and framing the lived spatial experiences. Through these playful inventions, the spatial references and dynamics of the hybrid, engaged, artistic practices transform both perceptions and materialities, as it usually does the space of playing, which function simultaneously as an embodied form of knowledge production and at the same time as an instant realization of the space of possibilities.

During my secondment in London (5th November–7th December), I conducted a month of ethnographic fieldwork through walking, conversations, observations, and collecting ephemera across public transport, cultural centres, and key urban spaces. My exploration centred on: 

• How does in/visibility shape socio-cultural identities and spatial narratives?

• What forms of affective agency and creative resistance arise at liminal edges?

• How is empathetic exchange experienced amidst shifting social and spectral borders?

Collage as Method: Encountering the Unseen
Collage emerged as both a research method and an analytical framework, allowing for unexpected discoveries rather than predetermined conclusions. Encounters with zines at Freedom Bookshop became ephemeral traces of urban narratives, brutalist architecture of the Barbican winked back as though visceral traces of historical violence made tangible through architecture, rental ads in Southall offering box rooms, underscored the stark realities of urban precarity, creative shop signs in Kilburn became revealing layers of displacement and creative tactics of everyday.

With Whom Do We Share a Seat? Empathy as affect
I looked for embodied traces of empathy in urban settings, considering how they manifest in everyday encounters. Empathy, in this context, emerged as an affective sense of being in space with others. Small, transient moments—a fleeting glance, an overheard conversation, the subtle adjustment of bodies in response to proximity—revealed the ways in which people navigate shared spaces, balancing presence, avoidance, and unconscious biases. These visceral and sensorial exchanges exposed the underlying dynamics of being together in collective space. 

Public transport also provided a lens to explore relational dynamics and exchanges of what I call enforced empathy. The contradictory messages within public transport—warnings against suspicious behaviour juxtaposed with posters advocating kindness—illustrate the complexity of spatial negotiations in public space. Transport for London’s posters urging people to “take care of each other” seemed to contrast with conventional safety notices like “Mind the gap.” 

Unlike functional warnings aimed at physical safety, these appeals introduce a moral dimension, an enforced empathy that raises its own unsettling questions. The constant surveillance in public spaces, particularly on public transport through CCTV, seems to create an almost panoptic state of being watched. This perpetual monitoring seems to establish an in/visible boundary, raising fundamental questions about the entanglement of agency, empathy and power that is felt close to the skin in Begona Aretxaga’s terms. 

J’existe: In/visibility and the Uncanny
A simple sticker reading “J’existe.” (I exist)—bold, direct, and unmissable—appeared repeatedly across London, affixed to street signs, electricity boxes, and other urban surfaces. Created by graffiti artist Thierry Jaspart, these stickers encapsulate his vision:

“Some graffiti artists want their work to make people think; some bring color to neglected streets to brighten them up. But for most writers, it’s about proving they exist—leaving their mark, their name, their presence behind. I wanted to sum that up in the simplest way possible, so I created a sticker that says J’existe. in bold letters.”

Can these stickers function as both wounds and illuminations, echoing Anne Carson’s words: “A wound gives off its own light, surgeons say. If all the lamps in the house were turned out, you could dress this wound by what shines from it.”

 Do these small declarations of existence emit their own light—an insistence on having a presence in the public space? More than just personal affirmations, do they carve out a space for themselves, negotiating a liminal space between visibility and invisibility? 

Returning with Echoes of Kilburn}
My secondment culminated in Walking on Spectral Waters: Creative Borderscapes and In/Visibility in Kilburn, tracing the buried Kilburn River as a phantasmatic border. Much like Nicosia’s hidden waterways, Kilburn’s in/visible river holds histories of migration, transience, and creativity. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s margins as transformative spaces and Svetlana Boym’s “edginess,” the walk invited reflections on how spectral borders shape identity and public exchange. Conversations with local residents, archival research, and sensory engagement revealed how communities reclaim and redefine urban space amidst shifting power structures.

Utopic Aspirations 
Moving through London’s public spaces is ultimately an act of reflection—on what it means to exist within them, to be seen, to be heard, and to carve out space for alternative subjectivities within dominant structures. These spaces, both contested and generative, reveal the tensions between power and agency, visibility and invisibility. A fleeting glance on the Tube, a handwritten message on a wall, or the imaginary boundaries of a forgotten river beneath the city—all serve as ephemeral yet affective markers of spatial negotiation and creative resistance. In this constant interplay, public space becomes a site where power is confronted, empathy is experienced affectively, and spatial ontology is renegotiated. As a street art scrawled on the Dalston Kingsland Tube station wall suggests, the promise of democracy hovers between utopic ideals and the precarious realities of everyday life. 

1_Oct. 23– Nov. 6, 2023;
2_May 29– June 3, 2024;
3_Oct. 28 – Nov. 7, 2024

The secondment at UCY/ Cyprus ties in with the long-term research by Paul Rajakovics (transparadiso) on divided cities and the preoccupation with borders – in particular Gorizia (I)/ Nova Gorica (SLO). An essential role was ascribed to the psychogeographical situation of life in the North and South of the divided city of Lefkosia/ Nicosia.

Paul Rajakovics undertook the secondment in 3 phases, for which he shifted his accommodation between the North, the South and then returning to the North.

In the first phase he held conversations with residents especially in the North, with Barçin Gökbörü (sociologist) and his contacts, and with Socrates Stratis and his contacts in the South. He gave the talk „Social Spaces between direct urbanism and architecture“ and held guest critiques at the University of Cyprus. He further explored the island from both sides (especially Famagusta/ the „death city“, former prime tourism destination which has been attracting a dark tourism, since parts of Famagusta were opened in 2020) for understanding the complexity of the current issues in their geopolitical dimension.

In the second phase he participated in the AESOP Symposium „Constructing Peace through Public Space: What Publics? Whose Commons?“ (May 30–31, 2024), where he presented „Learning from Gorizia (I)/ Nova Gorica (SLO)“, and especially „Moving Seats for Understanding“ , a project he had conceived for the border between Gorizia (I)/ Nova Gorica (SLO) in 2024. The goal of this project is to provide a moving platform (rail trolley) on the railway tracks which devide the two cities for inviting people around Europe and beyond to discuss their issues of turmoiled and conflicted border situations–as in Cyprus (Nicosia/ Lefkosia). Maybe this concept could also serve as an initiative to conceive of a transfer of discussions along the border between the North and the South, between Nicosia and Lefkosia.

In the third phase Paul Rajakovics held interviews with residents from both sides of the border, addressing the current issues and hopes/ perspectives for overcoming the border. These interviews, as well as the material and experience gathered, will be part of the ongoing longterm archive of Paul Rajakovics and result in new projects.

Feb. 12-26, 2023;  Sept. 10-26, 2023

 THE WALK, THE PARADE,THE PAVILION AND THE STICKER
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN TWO POST-INDUSTRIAL CITIES
BARBARA HOLUB & JASPAR JOSEPH-LESTER

The performative walk THE WALK, THE PARADE, THE PAVILION AND THE STICKER between Van Abbemuseum and Onomatopee is based on the collaboration between Barbara Holub and Jaspar Joseph-Lester for WE PARAPOM! European Parade of Apple Trees – a flagship project Barbara Holub conceived and directed for the European Capital of Culture Chemnitz 2025 (2021-2023), for which she had invited Joseph-Lester to produce a project. It connected Chemnitz (former Karl-Marx-City/ GDR). and Eindhoven (NL), two cities which at first glance don’t seem to have any obvious connections or similarities. Eindhoven and Chemnitz are post-industrial cities and both cities are in the process of transformation. However, these processes are at very different stages and their development

has moved in quite different directions. Whereas the legacy of Philips, with all its remnants of a socially engaged enterprise around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century is still omnipresent in Eindhoven (the last factories now being turned into creative hubs), Chemnitz is still in the process

of emancipating from the traumatic re-unification after the fall of the iron curtain in 1989.

WALKING AS CRITICAL MAPPING – METHODS AND OUTCOME

The performative walk was based on an intensive research of the site, also referring to the industrial history along the River Dommel, for exploring specific topics concerning current urbanistic and social issues and hidden poetic moments in the neighbourhood.

Barbara Holub and Jaspar Joseph-Lester presented three sites as „platforms“ for communal engagement as result of their research to be appropriated by citizens as underrecognized public spaces. The walk was continuously interrupted by calling out the issues of WE PARAPOM!, which were then placed as prints at the various sites. At platform #2 the participants were asked to conceive stickers responding to the stickers encountered during the walk (referring to Chemnitz Pavilion/ see report byJaspar Joseph-Lester) which were produced as Riso-prints in a workshop at Onomatopee concluding the walk. After platform #3 the participants were invited to engage in a dialogue across the channel of the River Dommel, calling out loudly selected issues of WE PARAPOM! with paper megaphones.
The final outcome was a zine produced by Onomatopee (available in the shop at Van Abbemuseum)  and a video (presented at the Angewandte Festival, University of Applied Arts, June 2024).