jilly traganou
Embodied Infrastructures: Prefigurative Politics as Acts of Dissenting with Things
More than repertoires of contention that oppose the status quo prefigurative politics build preferred “worlds,” aiming to create “the reality of the ‘not yet’ in the present” (Dinerstein, 2015). In this talk I will discuss “embodied infrastructures,” the sociotechnical assemblages of humans and things that support prefiguration—a word that derives from the Latin prae (“before”) and figurare (“to form, shape”). The processes of materiality, in which participants in these movements are involved, include collective acts of maintenance and affective labor, such as the creation of community kitchens or self-managed installation of technical infrastructures, in which both humans and things are deployed in precarious but dynamic relations. Central in these environments is a feminist materialist action, both because of women’s leading role in movements of prefiguration, and the anti-patriarchal principles embedded in their overall practices.
BIOGRAPHY
Jilly Traganou (Dipl. Arch. Eng., PhD) is an architect, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at Parsons School of Design, The New School, in New York, and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Design and Culture. She is author of Designing the Olympics: Representation, Participation, Contestation (Routledge, 2016) and The Tokaido Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004)—and editor of Design and Political Dissent (Routledge, 2020); and Travel, Space, Architecture, co-edited with Miodrag Mitrašinovic (Ashgate, 2009). Her current work focuses on the role of space, maintenance, and materiality in prefigurative politics.