Borrowing from Adaptive Reuse: A Transdisciplinary Workshop and Exchange

Description

While the term ‘adaptive reuse’ has its origins in architecture, it describes any practice which engages with and transforms already existing material, and therefore transcends any concept of disciplinary boundaries. ‘Borrowing’ between architecture and literature has a long history, inspiring the work of practitioners across both fields: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the influence of Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the oeuvre of Lina Bo Bardi, Jennifer Bloomer’s diffractive readings of Joyce and Piranesi, Renee Gladman’s architectural prose drawings and her series of novels set in the invented city-state of Ravicka.

This workshop aims to encourage further exchange by inviting participants from different backgrounds and disciplines to engage with and respond to concepts and vocabulary from adaptive reuse. As a way to explore how existing works can be taken as the basis for creating new ones, participants will be asked to read and transform a selection of ‘as found’ texts through practices of annotation, citation, and translation.

• What would terms from adaptive reuse mean in the language of your practice?
• Can they be translated, repurposed, given new meanings?
• What does it mean to annotate a building?
• What can practices of adaptive reuse teach but also learn from other disciplines?
  
  

The workshop will be an opportunity to collectively investigate issues ranging from practices of (re)reading and listening, to acts of translation and reinterpretation, to questions of shared authorship and responsibility, testing these and other ideas in an exercise of sympoiesis or ‘making with’.

Building on Lyn Hejinian’s concept of the ‘open text’ – characterised by Mia You as both collaborative and generative, “allowing for ongoing or future compositions” (Mia You, An exercise in analysis as enjoyment, 2022) we will produce a series of collectively authored, co-edited iterative publications, continually annotating and reworking each other’s texts throughout the duration of the workshop. Afterwards, these will be collected and published on the web platform Adapt, Reuse.

The hope is that through initiating this transdisciplinary dialogue, together we will (re)define a set of terms – descriptive, but also active and generative – that can offer a potential new language and vocabulary to guide and encourage practices of adaptive reuse.

About Mia You

Mia You is author of the poetry collections I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and Festival (forthcoming from Belladonna, 2024), and the chapbooks Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007) and Rouse the Ruse and the Rush (Nion Editions, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, the Boston Review, nY, De Gids, Nioques and the PEN Poetry Series. Other writing has appeared in Artforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the European Review of Books, as well as ELH  and Textual Practice. Currently she teaches Anglophone literature at the Universiteit Utrecht and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute. She is also working on a three-year Dutch Research Council-funded project titled, ‘Poetry in the Age of Global English’.

Date and location:

• Tuesday December 10th 2024
• 10h00 - 16h00
• UHasselt Campus Diepenbeek, Room E-B20, Gebouw E, Agoralaan, 3590 Diepenbeek
  
  
• Limited to maximum 16 participants
• Participation is free, but registration is obligatory
• Only physical participation is possible, it is not possible to join online
• Lunch will be provided – please specify any special dietary requirements upon registration
  
  
• For UHasselt Fac ARK PhD researchers attending the session, participation counts towards the Doctoral School requirement of Advanced discipline-specific knowledge.

More information

• Since the output of the workshop will be published online at www.adaptreuse.org, publication consent is a condition of participation in the workshop. All participants will therefore be asked complete a standard GDPR consent form upon registration.
• If for privacy reasons any participant does not wish their output to be published under their own name, they will have the option to publish anonymously.
• With regard to copyright, the Adapt, Reuse platform has been developed following the guidelines of the experimental licence Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r). Under this licence, the legal author extends their rights and invites others to copy, distribute, and modify the work. The CC4r licence will also apply to all work produced by participants during the workshop.