CARING FOR THE ‘EMPTY’ SITE

As architecture scholars Karin Reisinger and Meike Schalk observe, “The feminist strategy of making visible is often a critical reaction to that which has been rendered invisible or lacks rep- resentation, and which therefore demands to be reactivated”.22 _{This thesis can be found to}

employ such a feminist strategy, making visible the neglected aspects of sites, expressing empa- thy towards the overlooked and marginal details cast aside, challenging official and archival narratives, speaking for places under pressure, attentively listening to ‘empty’ sites with care. These acts of care are politically charged. Capitalism has “replaced acts of maintenance with acts of extraction”.23 _{Our anthropogenic landscapes are haunted by extractive pasts, acts of}

warfare and imagined futures, “ghosts we cannot see and those we chose to forget”; our dis- turbed paths evidence our willingness to “turn things into rubble, destroy atmospheres, sell out companion species in exchange for dream worlds of progress”.24

_{This thesis follows feminist thinkers such as Donna Haraway who champion ‘staying with}

the trouble’,25 _{practices that are “grounded in the world, while, at the same time, recognising}

their potential to make worlds otherwise”,26 _{and which focus on the transformative power of}

conditions of power of the sites into which it intervenes and to probe the limits of the sites it transforms — particularly textual–spatial disciplinary procedures, through an interweaving of narrative forms that seek to disrupt the boundaries conventionally separating genres such as scholarly and poetic writing, and thereby, as others have done, “acknowledging poetic vision as a form of knowledge.”28

_{As with Rendell’s site–writing, and equally following ecofeminist scholar Haraway’s notion}

of ‘situated knowledges’,29 _{it is key that the practice I propose is ‘situated’ and takes thoroughly}

into account that which has been excluded. Haraway has suggested that the discernment of any situation is always conditioned by the perspectives of a subject who is both spatially and temporally located — that knowledge is embedded, partial, relational, and site–specific.30 _To

be situated is to be somewhere in particular, as opposed to claim an authoritative and totalising vision; it is to reject absolutist and relativist positions, but to instead open to an array of possi- bilities, to an array of potential footnotes.31 _{A paracontextual practice is one which is not merely re-}

flective, insular, but diffractive and which, while acknowledging the situation of the practition- er, does so not at the expense of the phenomena emergent from the site or sites themselves — it is about more than myself, and a planet that is greater and more powerful than all of us.32 _{It is in this light that this thesis — in its intention to disrupt powers that place emphasis on}

the visible, the known, the central, and disregard the edges, the banlieues, as well as the tabula

rasas — aligns with matters of care, where care is “unthinkable as something abstracted from

its situatedness”33 _{and to care is “not self–indulgent; it is radical and necessary”.}34 _Caring

about, taking care of and care giving are expressive of a responsibility to others. Calls to care are everywhere, with ethical and emotional implications; sometimes such calls are exploitive,

28. Mary Mellor, Feminism and Ecology (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 3.

29. Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14.3 (1988), 575–599; and, Nine Lykke, ‘Materialisms Prologue: Anticipating Feminist Futures While Playing with Materialisms’, in Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice: Materialisms, Activisms, Dialogues, Pedagogies, Projections, ed. by Meike Schalk, Thérèse Kristiansson and Ramia Mazé (Baunach: AADR, 2017), pp. 27–31 (p. 30).

where being–seen–to care obscures questionable morals; sometimes we don’t have time to care enough, to care for ourselves or our landscapes.35 _{Yet, care is, as ecofeminist María Puig de la}

Bellacasa asserts, worth reclaiming for its potential to disrupt, to stand against neglect — to cultivate ‘power–with’ and ‘power–from–within’ rather than ‘power–over’.36 _{We need practices}

that reveal “how power and privilege function”,37 _{and that can also enable their reconstruc-}

tion, “developing new forms of activism, expanding dialogues, engaging materialisms, trans- forming pedagogies, and projecting alternatives” that can help to recover the marginalised, such as the peripheral phenomena of ‘empty’ sites with which this thesis is concerned.38 _We

need practices that oppose the rush and quantification of neoliberal society, that value time– taken and attention to detail. Such acts of care–full attention have been advocated by other creative–critical practitioners, where: “We might say, then, that rigorous scholarship is, like writing–beside, a matter of taking care. Or put another way: in taking care, writing–beside is a form of rigorous scholarship”.39 _{It is to such practices of care I turn to and alongside which I}

position my own paracontextual practice, where the missing images of the meteor crater and exca- vation site of a skyscraper were recovered not through random chance but through meticulous scrutiny of the evidence (and the less evident). It is a practice which, though it may admit things to which I am drawn (with the implication of a fragile connection),40 _{in fact enacts an obsessive}

attention to detail and searching for what might not be visible nor easily located.

In my own marginal situation — as a female operating between disciplines — I am drawn to phenomena beside and beyond, drawn to operating with marginal tactics indicative of the dis- coveries I have made and of the affiliation I feel for overlooked sites and outlying materials. As an embodied researcher, I have found myself aligned with feminist agendas, though this was not, for me, a conscious starting point. It is a position that has emerged and become more crit- ical to me over the course of the research, consequent of acknowledging the array of situa- tions that have arisen (the individuals whose work I have taken as precedents and their use of feminist methodologies; the post–war context and perspectives of key protagonists within this thesis, such as architect Alison Smithson; the political and ethical dimensions of the power that

tions of margins, boundaries, edges; with notions of the overlooked, repressed, neglected. These notions, found within the phenomena beside and beyond Parallel of Life and Art and ex- plored within Craters, were found to resonate with feminist philosophies and practitioners more–explicitly feminist than I was initially myself. It is, thus, that the practice I propose has become, too, feminist in nature.