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Journal of Chinese
Architecture and Urbanism Gestures for interdependence: Designing the unfelt

for spatial design. speaks to our ability as practitioners to be submerged in a

In architecture discourse, the notion of gesture is moment of making, not even being aware of the subtlety
often reduced to one-liners as “the building as gesture”, and care we put into the gestures we make. This is where
connected to an understanding of “gesture” as introduced the attentive eye of the researcher can make a difference:
by the god-like figure of the heroic architect. In our by re-enacting specific moments in spatial practice where
attempt to seek overlaps between architecture and spatially gestures are performed. Here, we can trace gestures that
oriented practices in other disciplines, we decided to direct work implicitly on processes of reconciliation on the
our research to the broader notion of spatial design. As spectra of places/sites and the bodies/entities.
the word design (from de-signare) is a combination of the In the discourse on participatory art, Sruti Bala uses the
prefix de, meaning “out”, and signare, meaning “to mark” idea of the gesture as a tool for relationality that go beyond the
(from signum, “identifying mark”), we start to see that modernist separations in the presentation and production
design can also be rethought as a discipline that identifies processes of participatory works. Very often, spatial design
or embodies performative gestures. plays a crucial role in increasing connectivity between
Let us, therefore, try to expand the notion of gesture as bodies/entities and places/sites involved in these works.
an esthetic tool for meaning-making that can be used to 2.4. The epistemic space of drawing
undo processes of extraction on the one hand and help us
to instigate processes of regeneration on the other. Giorgio In choreography/performance, “gesture drawings” are used
Agamben describes the notion as follows: “Gesture is the to convey meaning-making as positions of bodies in space
name of this intersection between life and art, act and (in a visual regime, to convey meaning to the audience).
power, general and particular, text and execution. It is a Our interest lies in how we can bring these drawings in
moment of life subtracted from the context of individual as a reflective framework (the gesture happens first, and
biography as well as a moment of art subtracted from the the drawing comes after). And how these “tracings” as
neutrality of aesthetics: It is pure praxis. The gesture is a method of observing and a method of activation of
neither use value nor exchange value, neither biographic the archive can help us retrace the micro-engagements
experience nor impersonal event: it is the other side of the between the design actors at play.
commodity that lets the “crystals of this common social While drawing, we seek to expand the frameworks for
substance” sink into the situation.” (Agamben, 1999). situated knowledge-making in which the recognition of
Following Agamben, the gesture seems to be a generative different conceptions of body and bodying are at stake.
“container” that has the potential to be multiple things This entails an expansion of the early feminist epistemic
in multiple contexts at the same time (and in different notion of the partial perspective toward a queer, decolonial
temporalities). This quality seems pretty close to how the “I (Vasquez, 2022) and post-human episteme. We will not go
as an assemblage” (as mentioned in the note to the reader) deeper into how these epistemic directions take shape for
works on an abstract level or as the idea of any “concept” the sake of focus. Figure 1 — as part of the bigger “archive
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as an empty space through which we can move and give of gestures” — contributes to the discourse on relational
meaning on the go. and spatial esthetics (going from Bourriaud, via Ranciere
Reflecting further on Agamben’s writings, we can read to Vasquez), returning feedback to the expanded field
gestures as speculative building blocks for world-building of critical spatial practice. In this way, we will develop
(between act and power), where the spatial practices we attitudes and tools for the unfelt to inform emerging
study serve as micro-societies. When Agamben talks about transdisciplinary design practice(s).
a gesture as “a moment of life subtracted from the context 3. Fieldwork: tracing bodies of water
of individual biography”, we can read it as an attempt to go
beyond the individual and reach for connection. And when 3.1. Rethinking spatial design through situated
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a gesture can only become “art” when it goes outside the knowledge(s)
neutrality of aesthetics, he invites us to rethink the fullness In Section 3, we sketch a series of site-specific practices/
of different possible aesthesis that gestures can offer (and experiments. Every situation will be part of a spatial
words can sometimes not). The gesture as pure praxis then dramaturgical development, organized through the macro-
gestures of (i) approaching, (ii) arriving, (iii) taking-
21 From Groot-Nibbelink L., Nomadic Theatre, 2019,
Bloomsbury, London (UK); the approach of ‘concepts’
as spaces to move through where the meaning making as 22 Haraway D., Situated Knowledges: the science question in
a multilayered and multidirectional process taking place Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Feminist
through association and reasoning. Studies, Autumn, 1988, Vol. 14 No. 3

Volume 5 Issue 2 (2023) 5 https://doi.org/10.36922/jcau.0358