This week we’ve been tuning into some interesting panel discussions that talk about art, culture, the built environment and what this means for our post-pandemic cities.
We have been catching up on the Architecture Fringe ‘Fortnight Fringe’ which kicked off at the beginning of June with a conversation with Richard Williams professor of contemporary visual arts at Edinburgh Uni, Suzanne Ewing from Zone Architects and Christoph Lindner from The Bartlett.
We also tuned into a panel discussion with artists, curators and architects, hosted by Dezeen for the Virtual Design Festival - the world’s first online design festival! The talk was a collaboration between VDF and Therme Art Programme and formed part of a new initiative, Wellbeing Culture Forum, which is a programme of online discussions that explore the role of culture and art during the COVID19 pandemic.
Both of these discussions talk about the importance and impact of art and architecture as we emerge from the lockdown and begin once again to engage with our urban surroundings. They discuss space and spatial awareness and the visibility and sanctioning of art. They begin to speculate on the social and economic future of our cities and what we can do to help our neighbours.
We would like to pair these conversations with a collection of films made by Moving Cities Project founded in 2014 by Jevan Chowdhury. Shot across different cities worldwide, we not only find these short films beautiful and moving but they also make us think about our experience of a place, art, architecture and the city as a stage. Has the lockdown and two metre distancing measures heightened our awareness of our surroundings and our own bodies in the spaces that we live, work, exercise… and dance?
