Performing Architecture is a one-day graduate symposium, bringing together emergent discourses in architecture and performance in order to identify shared critical methods and to devise new territories for practice.

In their book A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari put forward a philosophical provocation that continues to be an important starting point for contemporary cultural production: we do not yet know what a body is because we do not yet know what a body can do. Performance art, which focuses on unleashing the body against restraints, and architecture which contains, programs, and even disciplines the body, are the two fields in which the philosophical question is made most keenly present. In their intersection, a whole series of urgent new questions emerge. “Performing Architecture” examines the affinities between architecture and performance to identify spatial practices resistant to both late-capitalist compliance and the limitations of either discourse, both architecture's focus on interiority and formal autonomy, as well as the utopian view of performance studies of the body's capacity to resist acculturation. With the issues addressed at this conference, we hope to offer lasting provocations to how we think of the body, space, structure, and design across the fields of performance and architecture--and beyond.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

activism and the public sphere
temporality and the event
filmic architecture
artistic adaptation
curatorial practices
institutional frameworks
theater
spectatorship
ephemeral/temporary architecture
utopia

Please submit abstracts of 300 words for 20 minute presentations, along with a curriculum vitæ to performing.architecture2012@gmail.com by August 11, 2012.