SITE WRITING
CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE: SITE WRITING
Site-writing is a critical and ethical spatial practice developed by Professor Jane Rendell, that explores what happens when discussions concerning situatedness and site-specificity enter the writing of criticism, history and theory, and writers reflect on their own subject positions in relation to their particular objects and fields of study, and on how their writing can engage materially with their sites of inquiry and audiences. Drawing out the spatial qualities of these interactions between writers and readers on the one hand, places, artefacts, and texts on the other, includes sites – material, political and conceptual – as well as those remembered, dreamed and imagined.
All students on the Situated Practice Programme study ‘Site Writing’ as a key module of the programme. The module is delivered by Prof. Jane Rendell, Dr. Polly Gould, Dr. David Roberts and invited guests.
‘Nothingness beyond Blossom’ by Chia-Ying Chou
The site-writings presented on the Site Writing website suggest a whole variety of ways for doing art, architectural and urban history, theory and criticism: combining image and text to produce variations in spatial relations; exploring the architectural and spatial qualities of storytelling; blending personal and academic writing styles to create different subject positions; investigating the interaction between material and psychic states; articulating the interactive relationship between writing and art/design practice; and showing how written responses to specific sites can propose innovative urban genres that hover between fact and fiction. By drawing on the emotional, as well as the political, qualities of interactions between subjects and sites, site-writings have the potential to reconfigure the relations between spatial theories, poetics, and practices, in ways that are ethical and aesthetic.
‘Nothingness beyond Blossom’ by Chia-Ying Chou
SELECTED ‘SITE WRITING’ PROJECTS
https://site-writing.co.uk/projects/
Il Balcone. A site-writing performance (2018)
Valeria Muteri
https://site-writing.co.uk/il-balcone-a-site-writing-performance-2018/
As Lightning to the Children Eased (2021)
Fanqi (Kiki) Zhou | Dalian, China
https://site-writing.co.uk/as-lightning-to-the-children-eased-january-2021/
History begins with the vanity of kings (2018)
Rafael Guendelman Hales
https://site-writing.co.uk/history-begins-with-the-vanity-of-kings-2018/
A Lunar Perspective, (2018-2020)
Eloise Maltby Maland