Pelin Tan: Pedagogies of Commons – Decoloniality, Alliances, Survival

Collective assemblies and pedagogies of commons are about searching for the spatial politics of horizontalities that lead us (practitioners in the thresholds) to parameters of scales and slow-violence of sociopolitical conditions of infrastructures. Any scale of infrastructures, from a refugee tent to a community garden to an alternative gathering of pedagogies of unlearning, leads to the question of the spatial justice of where, in which condition, and with whom. And, as practitioners and educators in between architecture, geography, urbanism, and art, we create a critical discourse and methodology through commoning in diverse trans-localities. I suggest transforming assemblies to transversal method-based alliances; and developing urgent pedagogies in architecture and spatial practices with diverse horizontal alliances. Threshold infrastructure is the gathering, the base of alliances that reactivates the threshold, the in-betweens, and the collective survival. Alternative collectively initiated pedagogical platforms and assemblies are emancipative forms of solidarity, care, resistance, and knowledge production. What are the urgencies of architecture pedagogies in contested territories? How can pedagogies reveal and bring about ways of unlearning and undoing? Can alternative approaches in education and research reach beyond established institutional structures and through transversal and collective approaches? Do they make a difference in transforming knowledge, and how do they shape the architectural practice of the present?

Tan will present pedagogical design and art projects on critical spatial practices and will introduce the Urgent Pedagogies project (IASPIS). A Q&A session moderated by Jayne Miller will follow the presentation.

Prof.Dr. Pelin Tan is the 6th recipient of Keith Haring of Art&Activism (2019). She is a Turkish art historian and sociologist, currently a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Batman based in Mardin/Turkey. Senior research fellow of the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research, Boston/USA. For more than two decades, she has focused on urban&territorial conflict, commons, labor conditions, alternative pedagogies, and methodologies in art&architecture A Lead author of the Urban Society report by ipsp (Cambridge Univ.Press 2018). She contributed to several publications such as Climates: Architecture and The Planetary Imaginary (Columbia Univ., 2017), Refugee Heritage (2021), Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022), Designing Modernity The Arab Architecture (Jovis, 2021), From Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023), Agonistic Assemblies (Sternberg/MIT Press, 2024).

Tan is an editor of i press established by architect Mary Otis Stevens based in Cambridge supported by the Graham Foundation (2023). Her forthcoming books: Forms of Non-Belonging (E-flux Books, Sternberg/MIT Press, 2025), and Threshold Architecture (DPR-Barcelona, 2025).

She curated Gardentopia/Matera ECC 2019, associate curator of 1. Istanbul Design Biennial Adhocracy (2012), and co-curator of Urgent Pedagogies (IASPIS). Tan was a Postdoc at MIT (2011), a fellow of The Japan Foundation (2012) and Hong Kong Design Trust (2016), DAAD (2006-2007), and others. She co-directed several short films with artist Anton Vidokle and got the Sharjah Film Prize (2020) for their last film: “Gılgamesh: She, Who Saw the Deep” (2022). Her current short documentary “Landscapes as Archives” about the production of architecture in Palestine is on show at Qattan Foundation, Ramallah (2023).

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Host or Publisher WNYC and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art